On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 23:35 -0500, Carlos A. Carnero Delgado wrote: > Hi there, > > the number of servers we have in my organization -- both physical and > virtual -- is slowly increasing at a steady pace, and the trend will > continue for the foreseeable future. It has come to the point that > apt-get upgrading && updating each one individually, and manually, is > really time consuming and prone to errors. We're looking into stuff > like Puppet and Cfengine, and it seems that either will do fine, but > we have this "feeling" or notion that they're a little bit heavyweight > for our needs. Not to mention the learning curve. >
Puppet can actually be incredibly lightweight. Whether you choose puppet, cfengine, chef, or another, any configuration management system will have a lot of residual benefits. Its hard to recommend that you avoid these, when you don't *have* to take them on to make puppet useful for what you're doing now. Think about how hard it is to repeat what you did on server A, when somebody wants A+something slightly different. What about all those standard things you do on every install, like add admin users, or setup ldap auth. When you use a config management system.. that stuff is easy and maintainable. Add in version control, and now you can actually figure out what you did to break stuff. :) > So, in the context of *only* dealing with installed packages updates > in an automated way[1] and having 8.04 and 10.04 LTS releases in > service, do you guys recommend anything? Did you write custom code? > Has anyone seen Fabric in the context of systems administration? > One cool thing is that with puppet you can make sure the packages get configured automatically as well: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Debian_Preseed_Patterns Anyway, puppet has also recently added mcollective, which makes it easy to do things in a highly scalable way accross many servers intelligently. I think Chef has something to do that already as well. -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
