[sf-perl] lack of perl in config management - all singing, all dancing

James Briggs james at ActionMessage.com
Sun Dec 18 00:32:45 PST 2011


Hi Earl.

Then that's very cool and welcome indeed.

I'd consider testing it in my environment and providing feedback.

(For organizations that already heavily use Perl, it would be great
to skip Ruby and reduce the language dependency count by one.)

Thanks, James.

On Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:20:53 -0800, Earl Ruby wrote
> No, the system I just described ("the former") both builds the system
> (like kickstarter), does the initial configuration, and maintains the
> configuration over time.
> 
> If you're just buying VMs from a cloud host you don't need the build
> portion, but you do need the initial configuration and maintenance
> portions.
> 
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 4:29 PM, James Briggs 
> <james at actionmessage.com> wrote:
> > For the benefit of those who don't know the high-level difference
> > between this system and Puppet or Chef, the former just builds a server,
> > while the latter both builds a server and maintains/enforces the
> > configuration on the server over time.
> >
> > (ie. almost all of the internal ones "run out of gas" compared
> > to the new public config projects.)
> >
> > If you're using a redhat-flavored system, then most of what is
> > mentioned below can be done with a few lines of Perl added to
> > kickstart/anaconda. (Testing and tweaking it is time-consuming though.)
> >
> > Also, most sysadmins can configure kickstart/anaconda, but Puppet or Chef
> > is more of a Ruby programming project once you get away from the canned
> > recipes (sample scripts.)
> >
> > James Briggs.
> >
> > On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:18:17 -0800, Earl Ruby wrote
> >> When my company first started building servers en masse about 8 years
> >> ago we knew we needed a configuration management tool and looked at
> >> what open source tools were available at that time. At that time none
> >> met our needs, so we ended up writing our own, mostly in Perl with
> >> some bash.
[ ... ]




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