[ale] Server Record Keeping

[Brian Pitts]

On 03/04/2010 09:09 AM, David Tomaschik wrote:
> TBH, I'm not even sure what to call this one.  I'm looking for a
> web-based app that will let my department keep better track of our
> servers.  Right now, our documentation on updates, installed versions,
> configuration

I'm tackling this at work by slowly moving all configuration feasible
into puppet. Things like software installed, services running,
filesystems shared and mounted, firewall rules, etc. are all going into
puppet. The other aspect of this is standardization, meaning there's
less to track.

> hardware specs, etc. is pretty spotty.

This sort of stuff which rarely changes is recorded in a wiki.

> I'm looking for
> something that will let us keep that in one place and pull reports based
> on almost any criteria (Memory in system, kernel version, IP address,
> mac address, etc. all come to mind.)  

I haven't done this, but it should be possible to hack something
together with puppet. Facter reports all of the criteria (memory in
system, etc) you mentioned, and puppet can report what configuration was
applied to a server.

> We need a way to document when
> updates are performed, when configuration is changed, etc.

The puppet configuration is kept under version control

Learning puppet (or chef, or cfengine) and migrating existing systems to
use it is a big time investment, but if you're managing a decent number
of systems it should pay off.

http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/
http://reductivelabs.com/products/facter/

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts