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7 of the Best Free Linux Configuration Management Tools

| Sunday, February 28, 2010
System administrators are responsible for the maintenance and operation of a computer system and network. This is a major task with a huge number of decisions to be made regarding the configuration of the system.

Configuration Management is a term that may not be familiar to many Linux users. But for system administrators the concept will be well known. In a nutshell, Configuration Management software enables administrators to automatically manage the entire configuration of one or multiple computers.

Why is this type of software important? By having tools that automate the configuration and software infrastructure, an organisation's server administration costs are reduced. Furthermore, this type of software enables a large complicated infrastructure to be supported with fewer system administrators. There are also efficiency improvements made by helping to reduce the amount of repetitive tasks performed by the administrator. Moreover, configuration management software help organisations to be able to scale up their computer infrastructure more easily and to instill flexibility in server configuration.

Configuration Management tools work by changing the state of the system. The goal is to get a system from whatever state it is in, into the desired state. The state of a system is mostly described by all the configuration files in the file system, and by the programs and processes that are running.

The software featured in this article are declarative configuration management system. Here the system administrator decides what state the system is to be in, and a runtime pushes the system into that state.

Read more: LinuxLinks.com

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