rdist(1) – when Ansible is too much
https://chargen.one/obsdams/rdist-1-when-ansible-is-too-much [chargen.one]
2019-03-21 10:21
We didn’t have a requirement to go full configuration management with tools like Ansible or Salt Stack. And there wasn’t any interest in building additional logic on top of rsync or repositories. Enter rdist(1), rdist is a program to maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts. It preserves the owner, group, mode, and mtime of files if possible and can update programs that are executing. The only tricky part with rdist(1) is that in order to copy files and restart services, owned by a privileged user, has to be done by root. Our solution to the problem was to wrap doas(1) around rdist(1).
source: L