Ansible is a tool to manage systems and their configuration. Without the need for a client installed agent and with the ability to launch programs with command line, it seems to fit between classic configuration management like Puppet on one hand and ssh/dsh on the other.

Configuration Management is a term that may not be familiar to many Linux users. But for system administrators the concept will be well known. In a nutshell, Configuration Management software enables administrators to automatically manage the entire configuration of one or multiple computers.

If you have more than a handful of servers, maintaining them by hand becomes a tedious task. Of course, you can automate this with shell scripts, but this is an ad hoc solution. Puppet can help you to reach a more consistent way of managing your servers. Here's how…

A few weeks ago I felt a little like a proud pappa, well maybe more like an uncle since I can’t claim to have been present for the conception. NetDirector, an open source configuration management tool that I helped get off the ground NetDirectorhas finally been released under the GNU Public License making it a bona fide open source application

Mark Burgess [...] put together an entire configuration management system in 1993 while doing a post-doctorate fellowship at the University of Oslo, just because he was tired of managing his systems manually with scripts and wanted to do it better. Which is right up there with [...] Linus.

What is APOC?

APOC stands for A Point Of Control. It provides a framework for centralized storage of application and desktop configuration which may be applied to users, organizations and hosts.

What is it used for?

It is used to reduce the administration overhead for large desktop deployments by supporting centralized management and availability of key configuration settings for the desktop and its applications.

The Puppet project allows you to issue system administration commands to one or more machines, and will smooth over the differences between distributions for you. For example, if you want to install MySQL, that action should be your primary aim, and you shouldn't have to worry about if the machine is running Maemo, Ubuntu, or Fedora.

Novell today announced the worldwide availability of Novell(R) ZENworks(R) Configuration Management, the latest addition to its systems management portfolio that helps companies reduce IT complexity while lowering costs.

This tutorial describes the installation of a clustered web, email, database and DNS server to be used for redundancy, high availability and load balancing on Debian 5 with the ISPConfig 3 control panel. GlusterFS will be used to mirror the data between the servers and ISPConfig for mirroring the configuration files.