Config management and bundle

Today, among all the other things I accomplished, I converted the rest of the system templates for the eyrie.org systems to Git and tweaked my personal configuration management system to make better use of Git's features to push data around. I was feeling on a productive roll, so I also wrote up the system I use.

This system has a long history. The first commit in the underlying repository for my personal workstation is dated September of 1998, and the underlying system was already in use at Stanford before I started working here more than 15 years ago. It survived several major OS changes and several significant reorganizations and only recently has been replaced for day-to-day server management by Puppet. We still use bundle to do some of the initial system configuration inside FAI before the system is put together enough to run Puppet.

Puppet is overkill for a few personal systems, so the system I'm using is based on our previous revision of our server template system, with some modifications to not depend on AFS and to make remote deployment of changes easier and simpler. It's not as fancy as some of the new ideas for managing all of /etc in a VCS, but it's been reliable and capable enough for me that the core of the system remains unchanged after ten years.