[Freedombox-discuss] Puppet/Chef Experts?

Philip Hands phil at hands.com
Sun Apr 8 18:16:00 UTC 2012


On Sat, 07 Apr 2012 23:50:31 -0500, Nick M. Daly <nick.m.daly at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks, I'm looking to turn my plugserver setup scripts [0] into
> something more useful for the FBX Foundation and was wondering if any
> Chef/Puppet experts were willing to help me transition the scripts to
> those management tools?
> 
> I'm sure I'll get to it, on my own, eventually, but this'll help it
> happen much faster.

If you want to have configuration management that runs in a small amount
of memory (which may well be a consideration on a plug server) then you
should definitely consider cfengine3.

  http://blog.normation.com/2011/02/23/why-we-use-cfengine-memory-footprint/

Note, a lot of people have a deep-seated hatred of cfengine based on
their experiences with cfengine2 (myself included) but cfengine3 is
considerably different.

I've been using it recently (so I may still be swept up in recent
adoption euphoria) and am quite impressed.

I'm using just the client, and distributing policy via git, which might
well be an appropriate approach for FBX.  Various people could develop
different variations of policy, others could then declare that they
trust that policy by signing tags, and then users would be able to
decide on one or more signatures that they require on a tag before
relying on an update, to avoid a central point compromise being able to
do widespread damage.

I'm willing to have a look at doing your scripts in cfengine3, but I'm
far from expert at present.

I do have some scripts (currently a bit site specific) for getting an
OpenRD to the point that it is able to act as an install server
(replacing uboot, configuring it, acting as PXE and d-i preseed server
etc.) for a brand new OpenRD to get it to the point that cf3 is running,
at which point the new box can be configured to act as an install server
for an OpenRD ...

Not having a guruplug I'm not sure how useful that might be though,
since IIRC they don't have the nice USB JTAG built in, so one cannot
make the assumption that JTAG's available.

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
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