The moment I heard about the Open Source Bridge Configuration Management panel session on FLOSS Weekly a while ago, I was hoping that I will be able to see the recording of this session (as for obvious reasons I was not able to attend and see this live in Portland, Oregon). They managed to bring together (for the first time to my knowledge) the creators (or maintainers) of *all* the major configuration management tools to date was very impressive; and obviously someone as myself that has been working with many of these tools (I haven’t tried/used automateit yet) would definitely see this as a great session.

Here are the members of the configuration management panel (from left to right):

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

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The Bcfg2 version available in debian etch is quite old (v0.8.6), while the one in lenny is newer v0.9.5.7, it still isn’t the latest stable version 0.9.6 that was released in November last year. Since this version fixes many bugs it is the version that is recommended to use in production at this time (unfortunately it breaks the reporting system, that will not be fixed until the release 1.0 planed for the next months). This post will show how we can rebuild a debian package for the latest stable bcfg2 release so we can easily deploy it on several machines.

Bcfg2 is a debian friendly project, meaning they provide inside the source package all what is needed to build a debian package very easy. We will use for this a debian etch system, but this should work on any debian based system. Read the rest of this entry »

SSHbase is a bcfg2 plugin for managing ssh host keys. It is responsible for making ssh keys persist beyond a client rebuild and building a consistent ssh_known_hosts file including all the ssh keys and deploying it across all the systems bcfg2 manages.

SSHbase has two basic functions:

• to generate ssh host keys; if a system has not a key in the repository, it will be generated on its first check-in
• to maintain a consistent ssh_known_hosts file, and deploy it to all systems. This will include all the public keys in the repository.

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