Michael DeHaan wrote:
Thanks, totally agree. [...]
Thanks. Glad to that, as a newbie to cobbler, I'm getting this more-or-less right.
[...] Then there are a few things that probably don't have pages on them, where we could take them off the main page too.
- power management
- PXE (boot loop prevention, menu generation, etc)
- configuration management (section exists already about puppet, but
should merge in the built-in config stuff and make easier to understand) [...]
I've always been uneasy about the way cobbler talks about "configuration management".
Installed machines can have a life-cycle of several years. It is in this long-term, ongoing maintenance context that products such as cfengine and puppet use the term "configuration management".
But when cobbler documentation uses this same term, it isn't talking about long-term maintenance at all. Rather it is talking about "configuration initialisation": getting some sort of initial configuration onto the machine that will probably do for the moment, where "for the moment" means "while my mind is on the business of getting this machine started; probably less than a day; probably less than an hour; probably less than even 15 minutes".
So I would suggest that we give care to our use of terminology and intention. I suggest we reserve the term "configuration management" for its generally understood long-term maintenance purpose (cfengine, puppet, etc.), and introduce a term such as "configuration initialisation" to discuss our activities of doing the initial tailoring. This initial tailoring might include hooks to install cfengine/puppet and just enough to get them started; it might include the material (hitherto called "config management", such as "management classes" etc.).
-- David Lee