I think that you providing an *ultra-minimalist* install of various OSes and then sponsoring a community-maintained set of puppet/chef recipes for various tasks and configurations would do wonderfully. We could have recipes to handle things like the installation of various security-related packages (denyhosts, debsums, etc.) or common utilities.
Throw it up on github and let people contribute their own recipes. On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 2:01 AM, Luke S. Crawford <[email protected]> wrote: > On 04/09/2013 04:52 AM, Nick Charlton wrote: >> >> On 9 Apr 2013, at 10:41, Sean <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>>> In an effort to become more efficient, I have undertaken an initiative >>>> to automate many common tasks. >>> >>> >>> I use cfengine for almost all my configuration management, and back it's >>> configuration with a mercurial repository. >> >> >> I'm starting to use Chef for the same purpose. >> >> I store my dotfiles in a Git repo (which is pushed up to GitHub), and I've >> so far gotten to the stage where I can build up a test environment (using >> Vagrant and Chef Solo) in a few minutes after firing off one command. I now >> need to push this over to my prgmr instance. I'll probably use Chef Hosted >> for that. > > > > I'm actually pretty interested in how I can make this easier for people. > By 'this' I mean 'automated, standard installs' - and really, I'm mostly > focused on the "install the minimum so that your configuration management > system can run" because I think you can pretty much take it from there. The > part that I (as the service provider) am interfering with is the "install a > bare metal machine" part normally handled by pxe. > > You need your base system up, first, right? and image installs suck. (and > image installs where you have to use your provider's image suck even more) > in my opinion.... > > So my vision would be some fairly simple way to start a netboot using > something like kickstart (or preseed from debian) - my thought is to just > set a bunch of those kernels in the read-only rescue menu.lst; people can > put their own in the writable menu.lst. > > But, it seems like all the cool kids use image installs these days, so I > could just be wrong. > > > Note, I don't really have time to implement much of anything right now; I'm > in full panic mode over our move to Santa Clara, but it's the sort of thing > that rattles about in the back of my head. > > _______________________________________________ > discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.prgmr.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss -- Jonathan E. Magen http://www.yonkeltron.com GTALK: [email protected] http://twitter.com/yonkeltron ב"ה _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.prgmr.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
