Idea for FreeBSD

[Tim Clewlow]

> On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 7:14 PM,  <wbentley at futurecis.com> wrote:
>> To who it may concern,
>>
>>   I am A FreeBSD administrator as well as a Solaris Administrator.
>> I use
>> BSD at home but Solaris at work. I love both OS's but I would like
>> to
>> increase the administrative capability of FreeBSD.
>>
>>   In Solaris 10 the Services Management Facility (SMF) was
>> introduced.
>> Basically what it does, is take all the rc.d scripts and puts them
>> into
>> a database to manage. Everything is converted to XML
>
> XML is good at document processing and for portable self-describing
> databases. Otherwise, I would think significantly less of any OS (or
> application) that used XML for configuration data. At least nothing
> that anyone would *every* be forced to edit manually.
>
> But of course the format of data in a database is largely
> irrelevant.
> You could implement the same thing with dbm files or a more
> forgiving
> text format.
>
> As for getting rid of rc.d scripts, yes they're decrepit and I would
> love to see them go but they're simple and third party software may
> depend on them being the norm.
>
> Just my 2c,
> Mike
>
> PS: I'm not a FreeBSD "hacker" or even an admin.
> _______________________________________________

I believe the puppet project has a lot of potential, or if not the
project then at least the ideas behind it, in regard to automating
administrative tasks. I particularly like the way it allows the
automation of the same tasks across different operating systems.

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/

Cheers, Tim.