Joe,
Slightly OT, however: my reference to FreeBSD in the context of Netconf
should in no way be read as advocating its use as a general-purpose
provisioning tool.
I am using FreeBSD in a very specific role -- i.e. as a test environment
for new IP architectures -- therefore I want FreeBSD to look as much
like a router as possible.
On 14/08/2014 16:02, Joe Abley wrote:
The cool kids are doing system automation and orchestration using puppet, chef,
ansible, salt, etc (choose your poison), with bare-metal installs managed using
tools like cobbler. Many of these are seeing more active development on linux
than FreeBSD, linux being a more popular vehicle for devops these days, it
seems.
Not sure what your point is here. I already use Cobbler for provisioning
FreeBSD in our testbed. Most of the other tools you mention I have
evaluated or used in the past.
There is no drop-in ISO import support (yet), and the support depends
upon the post-8.x packaging system, pc-sysinstall, and a small patch to
dhclient which is now in base. I use Cobbler "snippets" to customize the
installation, and a custom mfsBSD-based PXE bootable image is used for
bare metal and VMs alike.
There's a certain amount of cultural dissonance involved as a sysadmin in the shift between
"write a script to do X" and "write a cookbook/recipe to do X" but the first
time you realise that reinstalling 38 servers in twelve locations and shifting seven services
around amongst them can realistically be achieved with little opportunity for human error in twenty
minutes, the religion becomes quite compelling.
All of these things you have mentioned can be done (and are already
done) with FreeBSD. I know several people who use Puppet for day-to-day
operations in mixed environments which include FreeBSD.
However, my work takes place in a research environment, therefore
applying many of the automation tools would be too far out of scope for
my use case. In fact, a lot of it would just get in the way of the real
work.
But I don't want to edit and persist ifconfig/ndp/whatever a few dozen
times if I can help it. Hence my interest in Netconf for the long haul.
regards,
Bruce
