[chef] Re: Re: managing system files with Chef

[Sascha Bates < >]

Yes, but I won't necessarily know that one of my system files was patched and then overwritten by a template will I?  So that goes both ways.

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Daniel DeLeo < "> > wrote:

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.

-- 
Dan DeLeo