Daniel Jakots writes: > You can automate installation with autoinstall(8). You can also > automate upgrades with autoinstall(8)
This works like a charm. On our load balancers we PXE install with a local rc.firsttime that installs python. After that we do all the system, haproxy, nginx, &c management via ansible. > and from 6.6 you'll be able to > use sysupgrade(8) as well. We are looking forward to that. *However*, there is a lot to be said for regularly re-installing your hosts from scratch. This ensures your installer scripts don't rot as host system "features" accrete over time. This is prone to happen when you Ansible- or Puppet-manage servers. Things get added, things get removed. Often you miss hidden dependencies that sneak in; you don't want to be discovering those when you're trying to reinstall a production host after a catastrophic failure. --lyndon
