When you are bootstrapping an infrastructure, you may first want to bootstrap a configuration management system to configure all other systems.<p>To bootstrap a cdist configuration management system (http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/),
you can use an existing cdist installation, add<p>case "$__target_host" in
newcdisthost)
__cdist /home/cdist
;;
esac<p>to ~/.cdist/manifest/init and run<p>% cdist config newcdisthost<p>and you are done (cdist uses ssh to configure the new host).<p>I am wondering if any other configuration management system can bootstrap itself like that?
Depends how strict you want to be with the term "bootstrap itself"<p>I've recently started using Apt packages from a private apt repo for server/service configuration. The private apt repo itself is created by an apt package, which (once setup) is served by the apt repo, so changes to the apt server are made by importing a newer package into the repo and then doing an `aptitude upgrade`<p>The setup process is basically, copy two .deb files to blank server, install with dpkg, fix dependencies and then run the setup script that the apt repo also serves up.<p>regular (non apt repo) servers then simply run the setup script and are on their merry way.