On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 11:49 -0600, David Parter wrote: > > Yeah, I agree with this. A recent case for us was figuring out a way to > > manage our 6000 Mac clients. We used cfengine and puppet in the past, > > but they both required too many high level resources for the benefits. > > We are now using Kace and even though the upfront costs were a bit > > steep, we are able to get so much more done with lower level resources > > and everyone is so much happier. In our case it was a 3 to 1 difference > > in internal resources. > > Not to turn this thread into Open Source vs commercial, but... > > Sometimes the commercial product really is a better choice. > > In your case, I am curious about a couple of possibilities: > > 1) puppet and cfengine really did require too much high level staff > time > > 2) your particular configuration/application of puppet and cfengine > required too much staff time, but a rework could have simplified > it > > 3) [a variation of #2] Switching to the commercial product forced > you to rethink and reorganize the configuration -- the second > implementation, regardless of which tool was used, learned from > the first and was better (and in this case, less staff-intensive) > > Any thoughts on that from you particular experience? > > --david
David, For us it was #1 and #2. Our goals were (a) to create a machine database that our 6000 workstations updated with their hardware and software, (b) be able to easily install software, and (c) to easily make configuration changes. Puppet and cfengine have support for (c) as long as you can write scripts, some support for (b), and very minimal support for (a). We tried to roll our own database, but never could get something that was reliable and just worked. Plus both puppet and cfengine were a pain to install (all the ancillary software and the differences between 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 Macs). With Kace, it just works. With Kace, the machine database is an integral part of the system, we can install software via GUI (no scripting needed), and when necessary, I can write scripts to do more complex configuration management tasks. Since I am the only person who can script here, Kace has enabled our two software support folks to do installs, change passwords, etc. where before everything ran through me. In addition, it works across Mac and Windows. Kace is actually our third implementation and was very different as it runs very differently than puppet or cfengine in that it is a cross between push and pull. It took me a while to figure out how to use it as I kept trying to put Kace into the push or pull category and it is a hybrid. Just our experience, you mileage will vary. cheers, ski -- "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it connected to the entire universe" John Muir Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, [email protected], 206-501-9803 or ski98033 on most IM services _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
