On Feb 5, 2015, at 12:54 PM, Matthew Grooms <mgrooms at shrew.net> wrote:
> On 2/5/2015 11:27 AM, Paul Mather wrote:
>> On Feb 5, 2015, at 10:47 AM, Greg Byshenk <freebsd at
byshenk.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 05, 2015 at 03:07:46PM +0100, Guido Falsi wrote:
>>>> On 02/05/15 13:20, Ronald Klop wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 05 Feb 2015 13:02:34 +0100, Marko Cupa??
<marko.cupac at mimar.rs>
>>>>>> thanks to virtualization, my fleet of FreeBSD hosts
have grown to more
>>>>>> than dozen, and it still grows. There are some files
that need to be
>>>>>> identical on all of them (aliases, sudoers, root
crontab, pkg repo
>>>>>> files etc.).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I was looking at puppet and cfengine but learning and
implementing those
>>>>>> seem like an overkill for my purpose.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Are there any other elegant solutions which can help me
achieve my goal?
>>>>> Cron and rsync.
>>>>> Or create a pkg which you install on all servers.
>>>> He could also use an VCS system (subversion, git, fossil,
whatever) and
>>>> some scripts.
>>>>
>>>> This adds the advantage of having history.
>>> If it's really limited, you should be able to wrap svn/git
>>> and scp/rsync in python/bash/<tool of your choice> and have
>>> something that works.
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Just some quick ideas. In the end you just want to use
something like
>>>>> puppet. :-)
>>>> I Agree, in the end that kind of solution is definitely more
robust.
>>> But, agreeing here, as well, there are some real advantages
>>> in ensuring consistency, etc. with something like puppet.
>>>
>>> And a basic, minimalist puppet is pretty basic and minimal.
>>> Puppet can get very complex, but that comes from managing
>>> complex environments.
>>
>> I'm familiar with Puppet and agree with your observations above.
One
>> thing that concerns me with Puppet, though, is that Puppet is not
>> considered as a Tier 1 platform by Puppet Labs and so FreeBSD support
>> is inconsistent. With the current emphasis on modules and the Puppet
>> Forge, the focus on the RedHat and Debian OS families in many modules
>> makes it harder for FreeBSD users to use Puppet without reinventing the
>> wheel. Unfortunately, with Puppet, a lot of the "magic"
happens under
>> the covers in these modules, via Types and Providers, and if they
don't
>> support FreeBSD then they're not much use. (This is another way of
>> saying, "Puppet works great when it works.":) I know this is
a
>> manifestation of the general "Linuxism" of *nix, so I know
I'm swimming
>> against the tide in a sense in hoping for better support. :-)
>>
>> However, I don't get a sense of the vibrancy of the community
around
>> FreeBSD and Puppet. Is it thriving? (Because Puppet abstracts away
>> the OS from a sysadmin point of view, people might argue, "why run
>> FreeBSD if you're using Puppet?") Also, Puppet seems to have
evolved
>> rather than being the product of a clean, simple design. (Maybe this
>> is endemic to any Ruby-based project.:) The orchestration (e.g.,
>> Marionette Collective) seems a bit bolted-on to me.
>>
>> Despite all that, there is still lots and lots to recommend Puppet.
>> However, if there's another configuration management framework that
is
>> more "FreeBSD-friendly," then it would be good to know of
that. With
>> large-scale system installations becoming more and more prevalent, so
>> too does the importance of configuration management and orchestration
>> systems. I've been looking at Salt recently, which I've heard
is
>> supposed to be quite "FreeBSD-friendly." Does anyone know of
any
>> others that have a great FreeBSD community and support behind them?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Paul.
>
> Have a look at saltstack. It's easier to setup/deploy, does centralized
config management & orchestration in one tool ( like puppet + mcollective ),
scales ridiculously well and is more platform agnostic ...
>
> http://saltstack.com/community/
> http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/py-salt/
I've been looking at Salt (or saltstack, whatever it's called) for the
very reasons you mention above. I recently tested it out with
FreeBSD/arm Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone Black minions reporting to a
FreeBSD/amd64 master. I like what I see so far, and, from my reading,
the design seems nice and clean---or at least cleaner compared to
Puppet.
Still, it's the community that makes or breaks these things, and so
it's the one that has the best/most active FreeBSD community that I'm
eager to know about.
Cheers,
Paul.