Re: Configuration Management of root files system

From: John Miller (jmiller_at_incon.com)
Date: 06/15/04 

Date: 15 Jun 2004 06:51:36 -0700

Mark H Johnson <mark_h_johnson@raytheon.com> wrote in message news:<7Jkzc.2$SD2.1@dfw-service2.ext.ray.com>...
>
> Not quite sure how much CM you want to do. If you just want the "current
> baseline" for your root file system, I suggest using System Imager
> http://www.systemimager.org/
> which I've used to manage the master image of several clusters of systems.
>
> The tools are pretty simple - an "image" of your system is a chroot'd
> directory tree under the image server. Whatever you apply to that tree
> will be downloaded to the next machine you build from it (or when you
> update a system). The script used to do the downloads also allows for
> some customization of each machine (e.g., host name). You can have
> several images on a single image server; we have a handful of system
> types we manage that way.
>
> If you really want to keep multiple versions of the root file system, I
> am not aware of any good tools to do that.
> --Mark

Thanks for the feedback Mark.

Keeping multiple versions is what I'm really aiming for. I'm thinking
that as we progress through development that the /etc files will
undergo change while most others probably won't. I'm looking at the
different products and seeing that BitKeeper perserves permissions.
But I'm guessing that most of the linux developers out there just tar
the entire thing up, and archive the tar ball. So, /etc files are
managed by release, not by version. Perhaps I'm over estimating the
need for CM on this issue. Please enlighten me.

thx