[clue] CM for a small sysadmin.

[David L. Anselmi]

I'm doing a new install on a laptop. Does anyone want to hear about how I'm doing it? Anyone 
interested in propellor[1] by Joey Hess?

You may know that there are sysadmin tools to do configuration management, like puppet. A while back 
I read (on ifrastructure.org, maybe?) that they pay for themselves at about 3 systems. Well, I've 
had more than that at home for a long time so it's time to learn how to do that.

I asked on BLUG what would be good tools to use. It sounds like "small" tools like ansible, chef, 
salt are in vogue compared to "large" tools like puppet or cfengine.

Since I'm using Debian, Joey Hess is a smart guy, and I want poke myself in the eye learning 
something about Haskell, I'm going to try this with propellor.

I also have a VPS at work that I admin. Since it's RHEL, I don't want to be the propellor RHEL 
person (at least not yet), and learning 2 things at once will help me understand their differences, 
I'm planning to manage that one with ansible.

So if any of that sounds interesting to you, speak up and I can post my progress here.

If I manage to create a blog I'll write how tos too.

The laptop is being built from scratch. It looks like propellor is easier to get started on an 
existing system. So you could create a config for a machine, add one thing to it, and propellor 
would start managing that one thing. Then over time you could add more things and eventually 
everything you want is being managed.

I'm not doing that. Joey has speculated that propellor is the new debian-installer[2] so I'm going 
to make it behave that way. I may use it incrementally on existing systems I have but I really want 
to be able to use it from the start so nothing falls through the cracks.

That's not the way propellor has been developed. So I may want to build new properties when I find 
gaps. We'll see if I have the time for that, and if I can grok Haskell well enough.

The VPS is already up and running, and had a fair bit done to it before I came on scene. So for that 
one I may take an incremental approach. Fortunately I can create new machines easily so I can make 
incremental changes that can be tested easily from scratch.

So that's what I'm working on today (and probably by fits & starts going forward). Especially for 
propellor I don't see much on building a machine so I'm happy to share my experience if anyone is 
interested.

Dave