Re: Permanent settings

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 06:38:09PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> > * Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> [080220 18:00]:
> > > All,
> > >
> > > I think we're failing to discuss the primary use-case for this, which
> > > is one reason why the solutions aren't obvious.
> >
> > > However, imagine you're adminning 250 PostgreSQL servers backing a
> > > social networking application. You decide the application needs a
> > > higher default sort_mem for all new connections, on all 250 servers.
> > > How, exactly, do you deploy that?
> > >
> > > Worse, imagine you're an ISP and you have 250 *differently configured*
> > > PostgreSQL servers on vhosts, and you need to roll out a change in
> > > logging destination to all machines while leaving other settings
> > > untouched.
> >
> > But, from my experience, those are "pretty much" solved, with things
> > like rsync, SCM (pick your favourite) and tools like "clusterssh,
> > multixterm", rancid, wish, expect, etc.
>
> Agreed. Put postgresql.conf on an NFS server and restart the servers.

You've never actually administered machines in this scenario in production,
have you?

NFS mounting things thruogh firewalls will have a *really* hard time
getting past any firewall config person worthy of his name, for example.
And there are countless of other scenarios where it can't be done.

//Magnus