[Freedombox-discuss] Chef and Puppet experts?

[Philip Hands]

On Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:13:50 -0700, FreedomBox-Discuss.NeoPhyte_Rep at OrdinaryAmerican.net wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:43 AM, Silvio - silvio at fluxo.info wrote:
> >
> > I'm far from being an expert in Puppet, but I do have a SheevaPlug configured
> > by Puppet and it runs smoothly.
> >
> > Puppet usually fills the gap between the configuration shipped in a package and
> > the one needed by the user/admin. The more a package config has a desired
> > configuration, the less puppet is needed for that purpose.
> >
> > --
> > Silvio
> 
> Could you provide more information about how you used Puppet to
> configure your SheevaPlug?

Since nobody else has mentioned it yet:  cfengine3

(it has fewer dependencies than Puppet, and I'd guess Chef, and a much
smaller memory footprint)

Having said that, I'm with Jonas and his assertion that effort would
generally be more efficiently spent if devoted to making
preseeding/debconf scripting more flexible for any package where you're
being tempted to use any of these for editing config files.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with an individual sysadmin automating
actions that they would otherwise be forced to perform by hand, but if
we're making decisions about default behaviour for all FBs, then that
should be implemented by the relevant packages themselves.

Using any of Puppet/Chef/cfengine to achieve the same effect is
effectively just an attempt to side-step the edict against one package
modifying the conffiles of another (which would be another way of doing
this) -- while that edict is sometimes inconvenient, it's there for good
reason so one should be very cautious before ignoring it.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20110914/47c682e4/attachment-0001.pgp>