On Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Sascha Bates wrote:
Chef wants to manage config files as templates. I get that. I'm wondering how people are handling system configuration files that are large and sometimes unwieldy? For example, in Red Hat, the /etc/
sendmail.cf is 700 lines and we update just one. Should I really keep a template or cookbook file for something like that? We are running primarily RH4 and RH5 and have identified the following choices for system configuration files:
The reason for this is that it's declarative. When you do it this way, you get the same config file when you build a new machine as you have on one that's managed with chef for a long time. Consider the following scenario:
1. You patch line X of file FOO using regular expressions
2. You patch line X of file FOO using regular expressions (again)
3. When you build a new server, the regex in step 2 doesn't match and your file doesn't get patched at all.
It's not hard to imagine many variations of this problem.
The ideal situation is that your applications support config.d/ directories, but this isn't always the case. Anyway, I'd recommend carefully considering this problem before you decide to go off the happy path.
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Dan DeLeo