Configuration File Manipulation with Configuration Management Tools Student Paper for 185.307 Seminar aus Programmiersprachen, SS2016 Bernhard Denner, 0626746 Email:
[email protected] Abstract—Manipulating and defining content of configuration popular CM-Tool in these days and offers a huge variety of files is one of the central tasks of configuration management configuration manipulation methods. But we will also take a tools. This is important to ensure a desired and correct behavior look at other CM-Tools to explore their view of configuration of computer systems. However, often considered very simple, this file handling. task can turn out to be very challenging. Configuration manage- ment tools provide different strategies for content manipulation In Section II an introduction will be given about CM- of files, hence an administrator should think twice to choose the Tools, examining which ones are established in the community best strategy for a specific task. This paper will explore different and how they work. Before we dive into file manipulation approaches of automatic configuration file manipulation with the strategies, Section III will give some introduction in configu- help of configuration management tools. We will take a close look at the configuration management tool Puppet, as is offers various ration stores. Section IV will describe different configuration different approaches to tackle content manipulation. We will also manipulation strategies of Puppet, whereas Section V will explore similarities and differences of approaches by comparing look at approaches of other CM-Tools. Section VI will show it with other configuration management tools. This should aid some scientific papers about CM-Tools.