Talk:Comparison of open-source configuration management software

I've thrown some theory into the ISconf dicussion that might be better in a different section; feel free to rearrange, and please clarify my application to the mentioned tools (Bcfg2, Puppet, cfenging, ISconf) and to classify other tools.

Forgot to sign previous talk entry: Thyrsus 21:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Discussion of the article

I wonder where we should put the discussion part of the article. Not in the talk page :

The purpose of a Wikipedia talk page is to provide space for editors to discuss changes
to its associated article or project page. Article talk pages should not be used by 
editors as platforms for their personal views.

(Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines)

--Zethradon 15:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Anyway, for now, I removed the discussion part of the article. Here's what was removed :

ISconf is controversial in its treatment of preconditions and postconditions of actions. Some tools, such as Bcfg2 and Puppet, require explicit descriptions of preconditions to hold before they apply an action, and further require an explicit description of postconditions, to be used by subsequent actions. Together, these have been called closure. Couch, Hart, Idhaw, Kallas Other tools, such as cfengine, don't make explicit the preconditions, but require their actions to be idempotent; thus an action may fail, but it keeps getting applied until some other action supplies the precondition, and then it succeeds - and keeps succeeding. These tools rely on convergence. Burgess ISconf differs in that it places no restriction on the nature of the action to be taken, nor any description of preconditions, but it requires that actions be applied to a known labeled state (e.g., a pristine OS install or system image), which after the action becomes a distinct state known only by its label; actions are always applied in identical order. This permits a theoretically perfect replicability. Traugott, Brown In practice, this model deals well with the often non-idempotent actions of package installation, but it can be expensive: actions either incorporate all the initial errors of the learning done by the sysadmin in creating a change, or the learning environment must be reimaged to a known prior state before the perfected performance of the action gets recorded; further, either any action performed with the machine whatsoever must be called an action and recorded, or actions must be accurately divided into either significant system actions and recorded, or else those concerning "only business data". An illustration of the difficulty: does a user account constitute significant system state or mere "business data"?

--Zethradon 16:40, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Really insightful, should this be in the ISconf article? 2001:A60:16B4:7001:5C0:D6E5:1CEE:197E (talk) 00:36, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Discussing features that are not present in all tools

We need to come up with a way to list features that are not part of all of the tools' management models, without implying that having or not having those features is preferable. Until then, below is some work on package and service management.

Djbclark 04:01, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Package support

Note: This means that the tool has built-in knowledge of how to deal with the package format.

	Bcfg2	Cfengine	Puppet
apt-get / dpkg (deb)	Yes	Yes	Yes
emerge (portage)	Yes	No	Yes
epkg (encap)	Yes	No	No
pkg-get (blastwave)	Yes	No	Yes
pkgadd / pkg_add (sysv)	Yes	Yes	Yes
port (macports)	No	No	Yes
rpm	Yes	Yes	Yes
up2date	No	No	Yes
yum	Yes	Yes	Yes

This is very unix/linux centric; windows has its own world. Furthermore, how would you define 'support'? Do you mean 'can install/uninstall' an RPM, then anything that can issue rpm commands can do it. More interesting is whether the tool can manage the lifecycle, and include in any health checks the presence of rpm -managed files.

More abstractly, you could view rpm and deb package manager tools as a form of CM software all of its own, if you push out custom RPMs that configure system state for your cluster. Its not very elegant, but it is possible. SteveLoughran 23:09, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

I am pretty sure CFEngine has yum support, we use that everydat at work .... (not sure how you verify the other operating systems, but usually in CFEngine you just define how to install/remove/upgrade software and it just works, so to install software for redhat based distros, use yum install, for suse, zypper whatever, etc etc). Misleading table. 31.151.153.51 (talk) 23:21, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

agree. misleading... 2001:A60:16B4:7001:5C0:D6E5:1CEE:197E (talk) 00:43, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Service support

Note: This means that the tool has built-in knowledge on how to deal with the services.

	Bcfg2	Cfengine	Puppet
chkconfig	Yes	No	Yes
launchctl (launchd)	Yes	No	No
rc-update	Yes	No	Yes
sv (runit)	No	No	No
svcadm (smf)	Yes	No	Yes
update-rc.d	Yes	No	Yes

This is somewhat biased. People reading this could be led to believe it is hard to manage daemons/services in CFEngine, whereas it is really easy. I have been doing it since 2000 with it, it is just a question of defining a class on the returnvalue of a shell command or ensuring a certain process is active (starting it otherwise). Could not get simpler that that.

See Also

• Thread on config-mgmt mailing list —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Djbclark (talk • contribs) 23:48, 17 April 2007 (UTC).
• Ziptie —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.76.122.152 (talk) 23:13, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

External links clean up

There are way too many external links in this article and most of them should be deleted. The vendor links should all be internal. There really isn't much point linking to minor details like licensing or first release date. I know that we are supposed to cite facts on Wikipedia but that doesn't mean you are supposed to cite every possible fact. The links in the refs look good but I'd get rid of all the others. This might even help keep the spammers away too. (Requestion 06:01, 20 April 2007 (UTC))

Please geel free to ignore the comment I just left on your page, we crossed paths there a bit :-) -- in any case

1. There was an attempt to make most of the vendor tags internal with stub articles, however people seem to have been deleting them (I just realized this - the most recent example being Bcfg2 - several people are editing this, so previously I just assumed that they had put in placeholders).
2. Re: Licensing: This is not a "minor fact", it controls who can use the software, and how. The location of the actual text of the licenses is not always trivial to find (sometime in source control etc). Example use case: In many large companies, legal needs to vet all licensing, so links to the actual license documents would be useful for them.
3. Re: First release date, in a comparison article this helps a person to determine how mature a piece of software is, and is therefor an important piece of information. Again this information is not always easy to search for.
4. Software in this arena is in constant development. While I and others plan to keep this article up to date to the best of our abilities, we want to leave the reader (and possible future editors) with enough information to be able to update the article (i.e. if there is an external link to the current release page, it is so someone can verify that the wikipedia text is accurate, and then update it if need be; ditto for the OS support and security information)
5. How excatly would having less external links keep spammers away? I thought Wikipedia was a search engine black hole anyway, so why would they care?

In general you need to have subject matter expertise in order to determine what is a "minor detail" in this article, so if you do not I would suggest handing this off to someone who does. Cheers, Djbclark 07:01, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Would a good compromise be to make most of the other links references as well, or have a seperate "External Links" section (BTW are there tags to do that like with ref=?) Djbclark 07:07, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm just trying to get this list to conform to WP:EL and WP:NOT policies. The licensing and initial release date columns are fine but they do not need to be referenced with external links. Has anyone questioned those facts and asked for citations? You could make them all references but that section is already huge. I would also recommend commenting out the vendor product links or moving them to this talk page since those types of links tend to be the spam magnets. For example, see the other lists in Category:Software comparisons. They don't have this exuberance of external links. Black hole? Unfortunately it seems like the spamming has only increased since the nofollow inclusion. (Requestion 15:27, 20 April 2007 (UTC))

I personally think its a lost cause to keep the latest version number and last release updated on this page. I just updated the puppet information as it was 5 releases and several months out of date. Providing this information when it is incorrect or outdated gives the comparison table a false comparison unless each is checked and updated before making a comparison that uses the latest release as a factor. --Micah2 18:37, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that product version info is trouble to keep up. This is something that could be left to the individual pages for each entry, assuming such entries don't get deleted for being unworthy. To make them worthy, we need decent content, but this must be factual/educational, not opinions/research. SteveLoughran 23:05, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Micah, I see you are still keeping the puppet release info up to date. Now that there's a separate puppet page, I think the info could go there -and we could drop version/release info as a comparison. The only thing that matters in open source is is the project 'live' or 'dead'? If you use release newness as a metric you create bias towards projects that release frequently, rather than those that are stable. (SmartFrog gets release on a two/four week cycle, so showing release date would give us an advantage, but keeping it up to date is a maintenance cost I dont want to incur). —Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveLoughran (talk • contribs) 23:18, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Requested move

Comparison of open source configuration management software → Comparison of open-source configuration management software — like Open-source software — Neustradamus (✉) 18:30, 14 January 2010 (UTC)

Discussion moved to Talk:List of free and open source software packages#Requested move. Jafeluv (talk) 16:01, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

• That discussion was closed no concensus after 34 days Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:30, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

why not webmin

even though Webmin (+Usermin +Virtualmin +Cloudmin) are not GPL, they're open source.

Why is webmin *not* included?

I started using it since 1998, and still use it to manage several servers!

173.21.108.129 (talk) 03:56, 21 May 2011 (UTC)Marcos

Because Webmin is a tool to manually manage servers, not configuration management software to automatically manage servers from policies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 31.151.153.51 (talk) 23:24, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Juju?

Canonical's Juju should be added to this page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.120.220.13 (talk) 16:06, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

cdist

The cdist website has been cleaned up / added more content. Can you please check whether it's fine for integration now? — Preceding unsigned comment added by NicoSchottelius (talk • contribs) 19:46, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Salt

The description of salt includes the wonderful phrase "With the traction that Salt has gotten in the last bit, the support for more features and platforms might continue to grow." This seems to be very poor English, and frankly guesswork. Is this article the place for supposition?

Arusha Project

I propose removing Arusha, or somehow noting the project is shut down. Slaurel (talk) 21:06, 7 August 2013 (UTC)

170.173.0.22 (talk) 20:21, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Edit to OPSI

Their website clearly states that they do not manage Linux machines. It runs on Linux to manage Windows hosts. Quoting : "opsi is an open source Client Management System for Windows clients and is based on Linux servers"

Also Recommend NOT having Rundeck's article redirect here

Rundeck is alive and well but the article about it redirects here, somewhat inappropriately since Rundeck isn't so much configuration management as it is task automation. You can visit their website here: http://rundeck.org/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.119.81.135 (talk) 23:16, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Rundeck's part runbook automation fits - in theory. In practice, it is doubtful. Does anyone successfully use it for config management? 188.174.175.196 (talk) 00:38, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Recommend Removing SmartFrog

Their website doesn't appear to have been updated since 2009. 5 years without a new release or even a new blog post signals that the project is pretty much dead. Since it claims to support Windows, I wonder how well it can support Win7 or 8 both of which have appeared in the last 5 years.

--129.119.81.135 (talk) 23:09, 12 March 2014 (UTC)RecentCoin

I just want to add to this that there was a release 3.18.016 on 2013-05-13 but this article isn't updated — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:CC0:FFFE:42:EDBA:C8C7:BB25:B0FA (talk) 10:47, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Recommend Removing Radmind

They haven't had a release since 2010 (per their website), so this project looks to be dead as well. --129.119.81.135 (talk) 23:37, 12 March 2014 (UTC)RecentCoin

Still pretty commonly used / standard tool. Stable for like a decade. 2001:A60:16B4:7001:5C0:D6E5:1CEE:197E (talk) 00:34, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Adding an Agent Based property?

Configuration management software can be categorized by being agent based or not. Rex and Ansible (software) for example work without a special daemon, while Chef and Puppet appear to require this. The property could be called Agent, Daemon or Service. Agent is the term used in the Ansible (software) article. The Rex website also says "no agent required". --Athaba (talk) 09:22, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I added the property and a basic meaning, but I am sure there is someone with more experience, able to think of a better way to describe it. --Athaba (talk) 09:52, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

I inverted the column, because requiring the installation of an agent is an undesirable property for this kind of software --79.6.178.49 (talk) 12:28, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Chef is not open source

I cannot find the source code for "Chef" and since this comparison is based on open source software "Chef" is not supposed to be in this list or it should be renamed in "comparison of configuration management software" and a new column should be introduced like "open source" yes/no. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.131.167.7 (talk) 15:03, 10 October 2014 (UTC)