If you're starting from scratch, I can't speak highly enough about configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, cfengine, etc. The time spent getting up to speed will pay itself back many times over. Reinstalls become a non event. Finding out "what changed" isn't an issue. You can spin up new boxes, even if there are customizations to each one.

As an aside, you don't need to start from scratch to make use of config management. If you can just start off managing your motd and ntpd on existing boxes, you'll soon start finding reasons to bring stuff under config management rather than one offs.

http://ertw.com/chef-walberg-winnipegrb/ is a presentation I gave at WinnipegRB about some of the work I was doing with Chef at the time. While the demo is obviously missing there are some code snippets at the end that show what you can do with the tools.

Sean



On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Trevor Cordes <trevor@tecnopolis.ca> wrote:
On 2014-08-26 Gilbert E. Detillieux wrote:
> > http://archive09.linux.com/feature/123800
>
> Good luck with that...  :)

Oops, doh!  Turns out F20 (actually as of F17?) the DVD install method
no longer contains an "upgrade" option.  As in anaconda can't do it
anymore.  That removes the "offline" option which makes changing arches
easier/possible.

Instead they want one to use fedup, which, from what I can tell,
appears to be nothing more than a glorified "yum upgrade".  It strikes
me as odd, as fedup provides a new specialized initrd but then says it
boots into your system "mostly" as normal so it can mount all your
disks, etc.  Then does the upgrade while the system is all running.  Uh,
ok.

Anyhow, I see ZERO instructions on google on tricking fedup to switch
32->64, and the few people who have asked have gotten a firm "NO, DON'T
BE INSANE" response.  I'm not sure I want to be the very first to try!

(One would think you could possibly install a 64 kernel on my F19
system with 32b userland, boot into that, trick fedup or yum into
thinking it's 64-bit, etc.  But perhaps that would break badly as
whilst yum is running it'll pull the rug out on libraries, programs,
etc, by changing them to 64 on the fly.  Who knows, maybe it would
work, maybe it would blow up badly.)

> I'm with you on that one!  I've always found that to be the biggest
> pain about complete reinstalls.  (You think you've got a complete set
> of config files for all your customisations, only to find that you've

Sigh, it looks like I may be forced into a wipe/reinstall.  I've made
dd image backups of my drives so I may still give yum or fedup a stab.
Nothing to lose, really.

I'm always shocked yum upgrade works at all, even when arch remains the
same, so perhaps if it can survive the carpet-yanking there, it can
survive it when going 64.  Who knows.

Thanks for the help.
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Sean Walberg <sean@ertw.com>    http://ertw.com/