Linux Woes
I’m bored. There are two things that I’m looking at working on. The first is a long standing quest to turn NCSU’s Linux website into a dynamic site that easier for me and others to maintain. I’ve been poking at making the site completely in the existing MoinMoin wiki or redoing it in MediaWiki. Although there don’t seem to be many tools to convert a Moin wiki into MediaWiki. I’ve also been looking at using WordPress and Drupal. WordPress is inviting as its easy to maintain and seems to put a lot of effort into looking really good. The problem is theming the CMS properly. Unfortunately, CSS and similar magic isn’t really my cup of tea. All solutions will take quite a bit of work.
In a similar vain what value exactly does a separate wiki get me? Is there value in having an “official” website with the tacked on wiki? Should the website be one or the other completely?
The second project is configuration management. I’ve been researching the existing tools such as Bcfg2 and Puppet and have been fairly impressed, but neither seem to fit it what what I need. I have some brief requirements written up here:
I keep thinking what I want is something based off a distributed SCM such as Git. Where local admins can rebase the configuration tree to achieve what they might need. Mostly, marking a specific file as “I know I purposely changed this, don’t change it back.”
I’ve also been keeping tabs on Func which is very interesting. It may definitely play a role in my monitoring. But it doesn’t seem to be heading in the CM direction either. Its close…perhaps if I thought enough about how to implement some CM ideas on top. Perhaps after Func can pull as well as push.