How Do You Create Config Files Automatically?

An anonymous reader writes "When deploying new server/servergroup/cluster to your IT infrastructure, deployment (simplified) consist of following steps: OS installation: to do it over network, boot server must be configured for this new server/servergroup/cluster; configuration/package management: configuration server has to be aware of the newcomer(s); monitoring and alerting: monitoring software must be reconfigured; and performance metrics: a tool for collecting data must be reconfigured. There are many excellent software solutions for those particular jobs, say configuration management (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, bcfg2), monitoring hosts and services (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc) and performance metrics (Ganglia, etc.). But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated. What tools do you use to achieve this? For example, when you have to deploy a new server, how do you create configs for, let's say, PXE boot server, Puppet, Nagios and Ganglia, at once?"

Comments

A Database w/ Config File Generators

[Anonymous Coward]

At my institution, we run a MySQL database which we use to store information (such as their IP address, SNMP community) about network devices, linux servers, etc. We then have config file generators that query the database and generate the appropriate configs for Nagios and our other tools, and will restart them if needed. The idea is once you seed the initial information in the database, the config generators will pick them up and do their work so we won't have to remember to add the new hosts everywhere.

Re:Here, let me google that for you

[TooMuchToDo]

http://www.redhat.com/spacewalk/