Rahul Sharma (Editor)

ISconf

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ISconf is a tool to execute commands and replicate files on all nodes of a computer park. The nodes need not to be up; the commands will be executed when they boot. The system has no central server so commands can be launched from any node and they will replicate to all nodes. This makes it a distributed configuration management tool. The actual instructions are defined using Makefiles.

Contents

Theory

ISconf comes from the "InfraStructure administration" movement which created and defined most of the OS-side backgrounds (in theory terms) of what is now making up the Devops sphere.

Major Versions

The major version in common use apparently were ISconf2 and ISconf3, while ISconf4 stayed in a very long beta period. It had in fact been finished and put to use in larger environments but due to the delay saw limited community adoption.

  • ISconf 1
  • ISconf 2 (early 200x?) written by Steve Traugott tried to adhere to the principles of infrastructure administration better.
  • ISconf 3 (2002) was a rewrite of version 2 by Luke Kanies. (Unknown to what extent he contributed to it)
  • ISconf 4 was mostly written by the original author, Steve Traugott.

    • Trivia

    Luke Kanies later switched to CFengine2, until finally authored and released Puppet. This makes ISconf definitely the grandfather of Puppet.

    References

    ISconf Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA