<p dir="ltr">I'm always surprised that rdist never comes up in this discussion. That was the system we used at the old USWest and I brought it with me several other places. Having spent a year each with cfengine, puppet and ansible I'm retuning to rdist at my next opportunity.</p>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Mar 25, 2016 12:14 PM, "David L. Anselmi" <<a href="mailto:anselmi@anselmi.us">anselmi@anselmi.us</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I'm doing a new install on a laptop. Does anyone want to hear about how I'm doing it? Anyone<br>
interested in propellor[1] by Joey Hess?<br>
<br>
You may know that there are sysadmin tools to do configuration management, like puppet. A while back<br>
I read (on <a href="http://ifrastructure.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">ifrastructure.org</a>, maybe?) that they pay for themselves at about 3 systems. Well, I've<br>
had more than that at home for a long time so it's time to learn how to do that.<br>
<br>
I asked on BLUG what would be good tools to use. It sounds like "small" tools like ansible, chef,<br>
salt are in vogue compared to "large" tools like puppet or cfengine.<br>
<br>
Since I'm using Debian, Joey Hess is a smart guy, and I want poke myself in the eye learning<br>
something about Haskell, I'm going to try this with propellor.<br>
<br>
I also have a VPS at work that I admin. Since it's RHEL, I don't want to be the propellor RHEL<br>
person (at least not yet), and learning 2 things at once will help me understand their differences,<br>
I'm planning to manage that one with ansible.<br>
<br>
So if any of that sounds interesting to you, speak up and I can post my progress here.<br>
<br>
If I manage to create a blog I'll write how tos too.<br>
<br>
The laptop is being built from scratch. It looks like propellor is easier to get started on an<br>
existing system. So you could create a config for a machine, add one thing to it, and propellor<br>
would start managing that one thing. Then over time you could add more things and eventually<br>
everything you want is being managed.<br>
<br>
I'm not doing that. Joey has speculated that propellor is the new debian-installer[2] so I'm going<br>
to make it behave that way. I may use it incrementally on existing systems I have but I really want<br>
to be able to use it from the start so nothing falls through the cracks.<br>
<br>
That's not the way propellor has been developed. So I may want to build new properties when I find<br>
gaps. We'll see if I have the time for that, and if I can grok Haskell well enough.<br>
<br>
The VPS is already up and running, and had a fair bit done to it before I came on scene. So for that<br>
one I may take an incremental approach. Fortunately I can create new machines easily so I can make<br>
incremental changes that can be tested easily from scratch.<br>
<br>
So that's what I'm working on today (and probably by fits & starts going forward). Especially for<br>
propellor I don't see much on building a machine so I'm happy to share my experience if anyone is<br>
interested.<br>
<br>
Dave<br>
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</blockquote></div>