Best practice for network configuration

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2011, Christopher Browne wrote:

> But that being said, I don't like the idea terribly much.

Me either.  If you want to centralise management of your servers something 
like puppet is probably a better idea.  At least it fails safe - ie if 
puppet falls over then you just can't update your servers until you 
restart it but they will continue to function in the mean time.

I note that you mentioned cfengine laster in your post.

> Of course, this might be a moot point if the death of DHCP means that
> there aren't any clients coherently connected to the network.

This argument can be generalised as "Functioning of these servers at this 
time is irrelevant as their principal reason for being does not currently 
apply".

People sometimes use it as a justificiation for not properly separating 
nameservers too.

I've never liked this argument.  I think this argument has some flaws:

(1) That you fully understand every function this server performs.  You 
haven't forgotten any of them.

(2) Failure or partial-failure of this server won't have worse outcomes 
than if it continued to run without anyone using it.

I know you're not endorsing this.  It was just a fine time to mention what 
I consider to be a logical trap that many sysadmins and architects are 
falling in to :)

Cheers,

Rob

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