[lopsa-tech] Debian provisioning systems?

[Narayan Desai]

We use a combination of systemimager and bcfg2 to provision and manage
our debian environment. (in the interest of full disclosure, I am the
primary developer of bcfg2, and we have one of the main systemimager
developers onsite as well) We have split the process into two
parts. Systemimager handles initial system setup (disk setup and base
system installation). We have stripped out SIS as much as possible,
and use bcfg2 for all configuration differentiation and ongoing
management. Basically, we have simplified the systemimager setup as
much as possible, building a single base image that includes all of
the bootstrap stuff needed to run bcfg and not much else. The only
reason we need to have different systemimager configs is to change
the root disk layout. 

We run bcfg from inside the systemimager miniroot; a client's role can
be specified from the boot menu. So the system is completely
configured from its first standalone build. We have also written a
bunch of scripts that automatically integrate debian security updates,
and have things setup to selectively propagate these changes into the
environment depending on the class of the client machine. Since bcfg
does all of the heavy lifting, the systemimager setup tends to be
pretty reliable. 

We've been using this setup for a little over a year, and have been
pretty happy with it, overall...
 -nld