The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

Shane Stixrud shane at geeklords.org
Thu Mar 30 05:17:07 UTC 2006


On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Avi Alkalay wrote:

> Yeah, thats because Elektra main goal is not to help sysadmins, but to help
> unrelated programs to colaborate automaticaly. this way, helping the
> sysadmin is an inevitable consequence.

It seems to me configuration data in an Elektra like format DOES help 
sysadmins with managing system configuration even without fancy 
applications.  The sysadmin just needs to begin treating 
configuration data as a series of "command directives" instead big bang 
application/subsystem file edits.

With the right type of command line viewer / editor 
read-ability of raw config actually improves IMO.

example:

cfg_mgr -interactive

display /dhcp/sw/dhcpd/subnets/10.202.46.0-24/*

    use-host-decl-names = on
    options/log-servers = 10.202.46.2
    hosts/ws001/fixed-address = 192.168.0.1
    hosts/ws001/default-lease-time = 10000
    hosts/ws001/filename = /lts/vmlinuz-2.4.26-ltsp-1
    hosts/ws001/hw = ethernet:00:11:22:33:44:55

edit -format (ini,xml,text etc...) /dhcp/sw/dhcpd/subnets/10.202.46.0-24/

vi/emacs etc.. starts up with the the above information in the specified 
format (xml, ini, plain text) and the admin may now change values, add new 
hosts, options etc... as though it was a file.


The above functionality would just as easily be accessible via the 
command prompt with the right -switches.

Cheers,
Shane




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