Hi, On Thu, Apr 18, 2024 at 05:05:14PM -0700, Mike Castle wrote: > Anyway, suggestions based upon actually experience would be appreciated.
As others have mentioned, Ansible can be a good choice for as little as one machine as long as you don't object to installing Python and a bunch of Python apps. Probably best to do it in a Python virtualenv rather than try to use OS packages as it does still change quite often, but I've found backwards compatibility to be decent. I used Puppet for quite a few years. It was a nicer, more expressive and powerful language. It's also a lot faster than Ansible when you have tens of hosts. It probably does not make sense for only a couple of hosts though. I stopped using it because the rate of change (requiring changes to its server and client on all hosts) was too much for me. These days I think the original developers consider it "done" and have moved on, selling the lot to Perforce who I suspect will just coast along milking the community for what it can. I would not consider Puppet for a new setup at this time, mainly for that reason. Chef, never used it but did consider it when wanting to move away from Puppet. Again probably not make sense for small number of hosts. Likely has more of a future than Puppet considering Cinc. We all hear great things about Nix, but I want something that manages Debian packages, not replaces Debian packages. Ansible is still viable for me but I fully expect Red Hat to ruin it one day in search of profit. Which is their right. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
