using BCFG2 to manage Pantheon

Posted by Greg Coit on January 12, 2010 at 6:22pm

To support our efforts to make Pantheon and all it's parts available on multiple operating systems and virtual private servers, we're implementing BCFG2 (http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2) for configuration and management. We've placed BCFG2 configuration files for Mercury on Ubuntu Jaunty 32 bit server in our launchpad project (https://launchpad.net/projectmercury) for folks to start using.

Note: we're working with the BCFG2 developers on a bug that causes libgd2-noxpm and libgd2-xpm to alternately install/de-install. Until this bug is addressed and released, don't use our BCFG2 configuration files for production servers.

As always, please feel free to submit your questions/suggestions!

Greg

Comments

Hey Greg, Haven't seen BCFG2

Posted by SeanBannister on January 13, 2010 at 12:22am

Hey Greg,
Haven't seen BCFG2 before, can you explain how it's been used in Pantheon so I can grasp it's benefits.

Why BCFG2

Posted by Greg Coit on January 13, 2010 at 6:18pm

BCFG2 gives us 2 things:

1) For folks who want to create their own Mercury servers (using the instructions at http://groups.drupal.org/pantheon/mercurywiki), BCFG2 automates about 80% of the installation. We can use it to define the packages to install, the changes made to config files, and the symlinks to create. I expect we'll have BCFG2 instructions available when we release Mercury 0.9.

2) As we make changes/improvements to Mercury (and all of Pantheon), people with existing servers can incorporate these changes just by downloading the updated BCFG2 config files we'll place on launchpad.

Considering the number of Pantheon services, operating systems and virtual private servers we intend to support, we think having a common configuration management system will help us all.

Does this help?

Greg

--
Greg Coit
Systems Administrator
http://www.chapterthree.com

Yeah, that sounds great.

Posted by SeanBannister on January 13, 2010 at 11:41pm

Yeah, that sounds great. Could this also be a method of sharing custom configurations? For example if I came up with a configuration based on Mercury for users with a particular use case could I then share this configuration?

Just trying to work out how it integrates with things like user-data.

Yes

Posted by Greg Coit on January 22, 2010 at 5:46am

It definitely could be used for that purpose. With BCFG2 you can define packages to be installed (or not installed), symlinks, config files etc.

--
Greg Coit
Systems Administrator
http://www.chapterthree.com

Puppet?

Posted by kyle_mathews on January 13, 2010 at 10:20pm

Just curious how BCFG2 stacks up against puppet? I haven't used either (or anything else resembling these - I'm as sysadmin noob) but know someone pretty involved in Pupppet and know also that OSUOSL just switched to it -- http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci13...

Kyle Mathews

Puppet

Posted by mikedance on March 16, 2010 at 4:25am

I have just recently started researching bcfg2/puppet and would love to know why you chose bcfg2 over puppet as well

vote up

Posted by forestmars on October 12, 2011 at 9:18pm

This is exactly what the vote up/down arrow is for. I see that Kyle's question that you are 2nd'ing didn't have any upvotes and (making the assumption no one downvoted it) so it looked like you might have missed that.

I voted up both your comments as I too am interested in the differences between using bcfg2 & puppet for managing Mercury installs.