On Apr 8, 2010, at 7:24 AM, Evan Hisey wrote: >> Regardless of if puppet is intended to manage multiple similar hosts, it is >> still useful when you have a smaller number of unique hosts. >> >> If every host is completely unique then you get one some benefits of puppet: >> * you have a single place to review your configuration >> * you can make changes without having to do it by hand >> * puppet checks nothing has changed, and puts it back if something has >> >> However, I bet that all your hosts are a *lot* more alike than you think: >> * you probably use the same web server (apache, or so), and *mostly* have it >> set up the same way on each machine, right? >> * you probably use the same MTA on most machines >> * you probably use the same log watching and checking stuff on 'em all >> * you probably have similar needs for installing PHP and some extra PHP >> modules, which are usually configured more or less the same.[1] >> * you probably do a bunch of "install mysql, configure like this" stuff the >> same on each host. >> > > You forgot a biggy bonus of puppet, no matter what size you support. I > have several small ( as in 1-3) groups of very different machines, > and with puppet I can rebuild them very quickly on when they need to > be replaced or upgraded. doing it by hand takes most of a day or 2. >
+1 to this. Almost all the computers I manage have pretty simple configurations, but it's nice to know that with 4 commands I can wipe everything and bring it back to a known state. I use a tftpinstall+preseeding for ubuntu. Then puppet finishes the job. My usecase is probably different from yours because most of my machines don't have data that needs to be saved on them. -Patrick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-us...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
