configuration-management

In the Salt system there are grains and pillars. I understand how I can assign custom grains, but when would it be better to consider using pillars? akoumjian The fundamental difference here is that you can set a custom grain as an innate property of a minion, versus pillar which needs to be assigned to a minion at some point. For example, there are two practical ways to assign a role to a minion: the minion id or using custom grains. You can then match against the minion id or custom grains inside your top.sls file like so: # salt/top.sls base: # match against custom grain 'G@role:webserver':

Can anyone explain in simple terms what the difference is between configuration management and version control? From the descriptions I've been able to find on various websites, it seems like configuration management is just a fancy term for putting your config files in a source control repository. But others lead me to believe there is a more involved explanation. Version control is necessary but not sufficient for configuration management. Version control happens in some central or distributed repository, but says nothing about where any particular version is deployed or used. Configuration

i'm trying to figure out how can i add an administrative build to Jenkins that will manage a few builds, and how can i path the parameters from the administrative build to the child builds. Parameterized Trigger Plugin is what you're looking for. Once you've installed the plugin, refer 2nd snapshot below. Go to Configure page of your project. Search for Build > Add build step > From drop-down menu, select Trigger/call builds on other projects . After that, click on Add Parameters > From drop-down menu, select Current build parameters Above snapshot is of parent job A where i am defining a

In git I am familiar with how to checkout individual files that have been deleted using the git checkout -- [<paths>...] syntax (which is recommended when you do git status . To get all the files you could create a list and give the list as the argument to the above command. However when you just want all the files that have been deleted (i.e. rm -rf in your cwd and then you want to restore all files) generating that list is inelegant. How do you checkout all deleted files? Generating the list is not that hard: git diff --no-renames --name-only --diff-filter=D To make it suitable for git

Basically I am creating a Salt state describing Munin server configuration and I need to get a list of all minions known to the master, something like this: {% for host in pillar['munin_clients'] %} [{{ host.fqdn }}] address {{ host.ip }} use_node_name yes {% endfor %} The only difference is that I don't want to use pillar for that, I need this list to be populated dynamically. ret.get_minions seems to be relevant but I can't make it work for some reason. What are my options? I managed to achieve this using Salt Mine system (thanks to members of Salt-users Google group): {% for host, hostinfo

The UK VAT system is changing from 17.5% to 15%. What strategies have you used in your code to store the VAT, and how will the change affect your applications. Do you store a history of vats so you can calculate old prices, or are old invoices stored in a separate table? Is it a simple config setting, or did you bodge it? What's the ideal way to store VAT? Don't calculate it. Store it! HMRC are very fussy about getting paid the right amount of VAT. The rounding of VAT calculations is somewhat vaguely specified in the user guides, and leaving it up to future implementers to get it right is

I am about to start a project (.NET) and need to decide between TFS and SVN. I am more used to SVN(with tortoise client), CVS and VSS. Does TFS have all features available in SVN Have any of you switched from SVN to TFS and found it worthwhile? Also it looks like we may need Visual Studio if we need to work with TFS. [Edit] Money is not a consideration since we already have the licenses for TFS in place. And I am more interested in the Source Control features of TFS vs SVN, of course other features list is also welcome. Brann Well, to me, the choice is obviously TFS : SVN integration into

Are there any tools for windows like that *nix world has? I am looking for something like Chef or Puppet . I have found cfEngine but it still looks very *nix centric. Ideally it would be open source, and command line driven. The idea is to put together an automated infrastructure with windows based servers. Our current IT department does not allow non-windows servers. Chef is supported on Windows by Opscode. While we don't run Windows for any of our infrastructure, we do have developers who are continually improving our Windows support. We also get community contributions, and most of the