Cft (pronounced sift) watches a system administrator as she makes changes to a system. Its basic principle is heavily influenced by Gnome's Sabayon. Instead of the desktop though, cft is focused on traditional system administrators and how they maintain machines, mostly with command line tools.

Cft uses puppet as its backbone for expressing the configuration of a system, and for understanding in greater detail what changes the admin has made to the system. Sites that already use puppet to manage their configuration can easily integrate cft's output into the overall site configuration; for sites that use some other means of configuration management, cft's output provides a complete record of changes made and serves as a good starting point of integrating the changes back into the site's configuration.
Example

In lieu of colorful screenshots, a simple example will explain in more detail how cft works: cft organizes changes in sessions to let the user better indicate what aspect of the system they are fixing (the webserver, the mailserver etc.) A simple session to fix the configuration of postfix and to start and enable the service might entail root running the following commands:

tux:1# cft begin postfix
tux:2# yum -y install postfix
tux:3# vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
tux:4# chkconfig postfix on
tux:5# service postfix start
tux:6# cft finish postfix

If you’re using Puppet, and using Puppet to automatically generate configurations for other parts of your infrastructure by using stored configurations, then one thing you have to do is clean up the stored configurations database once you have destroyed a node, otherwise whatever stored config you created will continue to persist despite you removing that node.

Luckily for us, the folks at PuppetLabs ship a script that we can use to clean up after a node. It’s called puppetstoredconfigclean.rb and was located at /usr/share/puppet/ext/puppetstoredconfigclean.rb on my system. You can pass this script the fqdn of a host, or a list of fqdn’s delimited by a space and the script will remove all references from the stored configs DB.

So that’s great, except now I’m leveraging this thing called the cloud(in my case, the cloud is a CloudStack based private cloud) and I have the ability to spawn and destroy nodes on a whim….I don’t want to have to manually run this script each time I destroy a node.

You’ve bought Pro Puppet, downloaded a couple of modules from the Puppet Forge (and have written some of your own too), and you’re on your way to implementing your Puppet environment when it hits you: something feels bulky with the way you’ve designed your Puppet code. Your modules may not be portable between environments (development, testing, production) without significant tweaks, each of your node declarations may require a number of variables in order for the code to work, or you’re constantly needing to open up your modules to account for changes in your environment.

How do you manage configuration files across a wide array of games, played by millions of users and served out of multiple data centers?

Over the years Zynga has found that the right solution to this problem varies for each unique service and product. I’d like to present one of these solutions today: Apache ZooKeeper.

Apache ZooKeeper allows Zynga to update thousands of configuration files in under a second. Game servers at Zynga need to interact with various levels of persistent and volatile storage. To provide increased performance, game nodes talk directly to these storage nodes via IP addresses and domain names stored in a local configuration file.

Blueprint is a simple configuration management tool that reverse-engineers servers. It figures out what you’ve done manually, stores it locally in a Git repository, generates code that’s able to recreate your efforts, and helps you deploy those changes to production.

Wer an seinen Rechner kommt, muss stets ein wenig konfigurieren: Den Bildschirmschoner beenden und das Passwort eintippen, den iChat-Status auf Anwesend stellen, Musik abspielen. Und alles umgekehrt, wenn man den Rechner wieder verlässt. Mit ein paar Tricks erkennt der Mac seinen Anwender und erledigt diese und andere Aufgaben automatisch.

Info iPhone-Konfigurationsprogramm 3.3 für Mac OS X

Mit dem iPhone-Konfigurationsprogramm können Sie ganz einfach Konfigurationsprofile erstellen, aktualisieren, verschlüsseln und installieren, Bereitstellungsprofile und zugelassene Programme suchen und installieren sowie Geräte-Informationen, einschließlich Konsolenprotokolle, abrufen.

Bei Konfigurationsprofilen handelt es sich um XML-Dateien, die folgende Informationen enthalten: Geräte-Sicherheitsrichtlinien, VPN-Konfigurationsinformationen, Wi-Fi-Einstellungen, APN-Einstellungen, Exchange-Account-Einstellungen, E-Mail-Einstellungen und Zertifikate, die dem iPhone und iPod touch die Arbeit in Ihren Firmensystemen erlauben.

"look at this effing rainbow I just made for you"

Noah is an application registry inspired by Apache ZooKeeper

What does that mean? From the ZooKeeper Home Page:

ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

Essentially Noah is a port of parts of that functionality into a stateless RESTish application.

Apache ZooKeeper is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source server which enables highly reliable distributed coordination.

ZooKeeper is a centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications. Each time they are implemented there is a lot of work that goes into fixing the bugs and race conditions that are inevitable. Because of the difficulty of implementing these kinds of services, applications initially usually skimp on them ,which make them brittle in the presence of change and difficult to manage. Even when done correctly, different implementations of these services lead to management complexity when the applications are deployed.