Daily Archives: July 26, 2006

Today’s Political Puzzler

Politics

So recently the prime minister of Iraq criticized Israel for a disproportionate response in their attacks against Lebanon. I don’t know his exact words, but in general, I agree with that sentiment.

It’s no big surprise that Bush and Republican leaders have all been rushing to support Israel and taking their sweet time before helping with a ceasefire, and taking plenty of time with that process, too.

So it’s also no big surprise that a number of Washington politicians mustered up a good deal of righteous-sounding moral indigniation at the Iraqi PM. There were some that boycotted his address to Congress today. Lots of fiery rhetoric.

But here’s the surprise: it was the Democrats doing this.

Huh?

The populist party, the one that’s supposed to be valuing life and perhaps has recently started to grow a backbone in opposing ever-broadening war, is now in support of Israel’s tactics?

I think it’s all politics. The Republicans don’t want to criticize the PM because he’s part of the process their party started. And the Democrats want to pander to their base and criticize anything related to an unpopular war.

I don’t think very many people in Washington from either party have genuine ethics these days. They just take whatever moral position they think will win votes.

Thoughs on cfengine, bcfg2, and puppet

Software,

Yesterday I posted about my first steps with cfengine. By the end of the day today, I had things far along that I can:

  • cdebootstrap a directory
  • Run a special cfengine script to get the base files like /etc/fstab and /etc/hosts set up
  • Bring it up in Xen, apt-get install cfengine2, and use cfagent to bring up the rest of the system and install the necessary base packages (like xfsprogs)

Very nice.

I’ve had a few annoyances with the cfengine packages support, which doesn’t quite seem to work as documented al the time.

I also took a look at bcfg2 thanks to a comment yesterday. It looks very interesting, but I have a few gripes about it. I find cfengine files easier to read. I can look at a file, having never used cfengine before, and have a reasonable idea of what is trying to be done and how it will be accomplished. I can’t say the same for bcfg2, plus bcfg2 uses XML config files (ick) and a bunch of small otherfiles. While the architecture as the authors have described it certainly sounds appealing, I’m not sure that bcfg2 is a simple as cfengine. I am a strong believer in the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. But THANKS to the person that left the comment, and I hope that bcfg2 continues to evolve and provide an alternative to cfengine.

I also looked at Puppet. This thing looks very slick. Seems to be cfengine with a nicer syntax. On the other hand, it’s not really clear that anybody is using it. That makes me nervous — this is the kind of thing that can seriously harm machines if it does something unexpected.