cdist/doc/man/man7/cdist-best-practice.text

cdist-best-practice(7)
======================
Nico Schottelius <nico-cdist--@--schottelius.org>

NAME
----
cdist-best-practice - Practices used in real environments


PASSWORDLESS CONNECTIONS
------------------------
It is recommended to run cdist with public key authentication.
This requires a private/public key pair and the entry
"PermitRootLogin without-password" in the sshd server.
See sshd_config(5) and ssh-keygen(1).


SPEEDING UP SSH CONNECTIONS
---------------------------
When connecting to a new host, the initial delay with ssh connections
is pretty big. You can work around this by
"sharing of multiple sessions over a single network connection"
(quote from ssh_config(5)). The following code is suitable for
inclusion into your ~/.ssh/config:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Host *
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%l-%r@%h:%p
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPersist 10
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


MULTI MASTER OR ENVIRONMENT SETUPS
----------------------------------
If you plan to distribute cdist among servers or use different
environments, you can do so easily with the included version
control git. For instance if you plan to use the typical three
environments production, integration and development, you can
realise this with git branches:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Go to cdist checkout
cd /path/to/cdist

# Create branches
git branch development
git branch integration
git branch production

# Make use of a branch, for instance production
git checkout production
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Similar if you want to have cdist checked out at multiple machines,
you can clone it multiple times:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
machine-a % git clone git://your-git-server/cdist
machine-b % git clone git://your-git-server/cdist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEPERATING WORK BY GROUPS
-------------------------
If you are working with different groups on one cdist-configuration,
you can delegate to other manifests and have the groups edit only
their manifests. You can use the following snippet in
**conf/manifests/init**:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Include other groups
sh -e "$__manifest/systems"

sh -e "$__manifest/cbrg"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


SEE ALSO
--------
- cdist(7)


COPYING
-------
Copyright \(C) 2011 Nico Schottelius. Free use of this software is
granted under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3).