Bob Proulx wrote:
Miles Fidelman wrote:Which leads me to wonder: Those of you who run server farms on Debian, what are you using for: - initial o/s install and configuration (e.g., FAI, other things?) - software install/update/configuration (chef, puppet, ?) - virtual machine management - user management (control panels, ...) - overall management (nagios, webmin, ...) I'm sort of trying to get sense of what people actually use, and in what combinations, rather than what's got the buzz this week.But I recommend standard preseeding over FAI. That is just my opinion because you asked it. For configuration management I use my own tool set which uses portable shell scripts. It is similar to Puppet, Chef, cfengine. But because it is mine I know it best. I can't recommend one over the other but only that having some systematic configuration system is a must. From my exposure I would start with Puppet as a recommendation of something in wide use and with good capability. Although nothing is perfect. But using something is hugely better than using nothing.
Every time I go through this exercise, I come back to about the same conclusion as you do - preseeding and shell scripts (and a word file for documentation).
I keep looking at Puppet, Chef, and cfengine, and keep concluding that the negatives of learning yet another scripting language, and relying on someone else's "recipes" is more complicated that wrapping my own shell scripts around dpkg, apt-get, and ./configure;make;make install.
But I keep looing, sigh....
You should browse through the articles here: http://www.infrastructures.org/
Yup. Thanks! Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra