[Infrastructures] Entire linux hierarchy maintained in CVS

[Rick Cox]

We use radmind and Fedora/yum plus other packages.

I see package management as tools to obtain, update, and configure
part of a filesystem image (though some of course go further, e.g.
restarting services on upgrades). 

Radmind is a tool to distribute a complete filesystem image to many
hosts. Having a filesystem to distribute is thus a prerequisite;
radmind provides no tools to build that image (only to snapshot or
delta an existing image).

Thus they compliment nicely. Packages handle what the fs looks like,
radmind handles getting it to every host reliably.

As another advantage of separating these tasks, we aren't forced to do
all upgrades via a particular package manager (or implement multiple
package distribution schemes) --- I can't give up CPAN, and it's
really hard to do libc upgrades via that interface :)

To be more concrete, all of the hosts in my petite cluster are
radmind-managed (including the radmind server). Upgrades are done by
updating any host (using package manager tools to help) and then
uploading the new overlay loadset. It helps that all of my hosts can
use an almost identical filesystem, so I don't need much higher-level
reasoning about merging of packages or such to support node
specialization.

rick

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 08:23:11AM -0700, Jordan Curzon wrote:
> How you any of you mix radmind with the system package management? Do
> you only use radmind for configuration, and local packages for
> software? Do you ditch the package management all together? Or do you
> use package management to manage the radmind loadsets? What are you
> experiences with the different approches?
> 
> Jordan curzon
> 
> On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 12:28:05 -0500, Patrick M McNeal <mcneal@umich.edu> wrote:
> > >> Have you heard about radmind?
> > >
> > > We use radmind to manage a whole number of Macs and RedHat boxes.
> > > It's been mentioned on this list but there hasn't been a lot of
> > > traction.
> > 
> > We're also using radmind to manage our dwindling solaris deployment
> > along with our entire UMCE Linux deployment which is based off of linux
> > from scratch.
> > 
> > Unlike CVS and subersion, radmind was designed from the ground up to
> > manage all filesystem types.  That includes symlinks, block files,
> > character files, etc.  Also, it supports forked files on HFS+.  Since
> > radmind is platform independent, a single server can host any
> > combination of clients.  For example, our primary radmind server is
> > used for linux, solaris and OS X clients.
> > 
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