On 08.01.2015 00:02, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 07/01/2015 22:30, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: >> Am 07.01.2015 um 20:06 schrieb Tomas Mozes: >> >>> Strange, I only have successful stories with upgrading old gentoo >>> machines. If you have a machine which you update regularly then you know >>> all the issues during the time and so upgrading "per partes" leads to no >>> surprises but the same challenges you've handled before. But yes, it >>> takes time. >>> >>> Moreover, if you use configuration management like Ansible, you can even >>> automatically merge changes when applications ship new configuration. >> >> Thanks for that posting, it reminds me of some bigger issue I wanted to >> discuss here for quite a while now. >> >> Over the years I am now responsible for dozens of servers and VMs >> running gentoo linux ... and I wonder how to efficiently keep track of them. >> >> I learned my first steps with puppet and use it in a basic setup for my >> own machines in my LAN. It seems to work better for many identical >> servers, let's say in a hosting environment. >> >> The servers at my customers are somehow similar but not identical: >> >> different setups for services ... different update-cycles (which have to >> be synchronized and shortened as we have seen in this thread!) ... >> >> I look for a way of tracking all these systems: >> >> a) central database/repo with all the systems and how to access them: >> >> * unique system id >> * what IP, port, ssh-key, etc etc >> >> I use git for local tracking of /etc on most of my systems in the last >> years, but I did never really come up with a clever way how to >> centralize dozens of separate git-repos ... one repo per server pushed >> to one central git-home on of my inhouse servers? >> >> b) in addition tracking of let's say "rules" or "services": >> >> * which server runs e.g. apache? So if there is a new security warning >> out there for apache ... ask system "which servers/customers would need >> that update?" >> >> etc etc >> >> c) when was my last access to that server? Have I looked into it lately? >> >> (or more business-oriented:) >> Do I even have to / does the customer pay for that?) >> This should lead to some SLA-kind-of-thing, yes ... a bit off-topic for now. >> >> - >> >> Puppet is more oriented to push configs out to systems. >> >> Maybe a combination would apply ... puppet for building the basement, >> having stuff generalized (this path, that password/ssh-key ....) >> >> and some other components to track what has been done over time. >> >> I run OTRS ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRS ) for my daily work and >> looked into their module "ITSM" ( >> https://www.otrs.com/homepage/software/otrsitsm-features/ ) lately ... >> it allows to create "configuration items" (think: ITIL) etc, so far I >> think this is a bit of overkill and not really fitting the size of my >> business. >> >> I'd love to keep it simple and CLI-oriented: >> >> Gentoo allows to define (nearly?) everything via text-files, combined >> with the cleverness of git (and maybe puppet) this should give me a way of >> >> a) easily deploy new systems with configs according to some standards: >> I want these packages/users/paths/files ... >> >> b) track these systems: what boxes am I responsible for, what is out >> there and failing? ;-) (not talking monitoring here ... just what are my >> active systems out there) >> >> from there I should slowly get into defining new contracts with my >> clients including regular checks each 3 or 6 months ... what has to be >> done, are there any bigger updates to do (think udev, baselayout ...) >> and tell them if is possible to update the box within a few hours in >> parallel to normal work or if we need a bigger maintenance window. >> >> --- >> >> I am sure there are many other gentoo-users out there with similar >> challenges to face. And I am looking forward to your thoughts, >> experiences and recommendations! > > > In my opinion, ansible almost always beats puppet. > > Puppet is a) complex b) built to be able to deal with vast enterprise > setups and c) has a definition language I never could wrap my brains > around. It always felt to me like puppet was never a good fit for my needs. > > Then ansible hit the scene. Now ansible is designed to do what sysadmins > do anyway, to do it in mostly the same way, and to do it in an automated > fashion. It fits nicely into my brain and I can read a playbook at a > glance to know what it does. > > Ansible deploys stuff and makes it like how you want it to be. It is > equally good at managing 1000 identical machines as 100 mostly the same > ones, or 20 totally different ones. How it manages this miracle is not > easy to explain, so I urge you to give it a test drive. Fool around with > a bunch of VMs to get a feel of how it works. A tip: keep it simple, and > use roles everywhere. > > Ansible works nicely with other tools like vagrant and docker which > build and deploy your base images. Once you have a base machine with > sshd running and an administrative login account, ansible takes over an > manages the rest. It works really well.
played around with ansible today and managed to get this working: http://blog.jameskyle.org/2014/08/automated-stage3-gentoo-install-using-ansible/ I even forked his repo and added a load of features to my newly built gentoo-systems (systemd, git, german locale, chrony ...). Nice. I still have to come up with a proper directory tree ... the docs at http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_best_practices.html show a tree that seems a bit huge for my needs. One of my next goals: get all my local hosts into it and see how to manage them. ---- aside from that back to the original topic of this thread: The "old box" booted instantly today ... cool. Stefan
