NAME

cdist-best-practise - Practises 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

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).