When you’re at the end of the week and you know what you want to do, the two are equivalent.
When it’s Wednesday afternoon and you are still riffing on some ideas as to how to configure a new service, the preseed edit-test-edit cycle is in the order of minutes instead of seconds, compared to a script run via ssh on a stable running system.
That makes a huge difference to productivity, for me.
I generally do service configuration at the post-install stage and if I have a working configuration just get that from our central storage. Or just write a small script and add to the post-boot steps of XCAT to run the commands and configure that stuff.
I configure the service by hand at one server, polish it, get the file (or steps) and roll it out.
So, preseed file stays very stable. We only change a line or two over the years.
Thanks for the answer BTW.
Edit: It's late here. There's packet loss between my brain and fingers.
When it’s Wednesday afternoon and you are still riffing on some ideas as to how to configure a new service, the preseed edit-test-edit cycle is in the order of minutes instead of seconds, compared to a script run via ssh on a stable running system.
That makes a huge difference to productivity, for me.