[Freedombox-discuss] Chef and Puppet experts?

[Les Orchard]

On 9/9/11 9:55 PM, Nick Daly wrote:
> Puppet/Chef could do that well, but I'm wary.  It seems to operate at
> too low a level and exerts too strong (too perfect) a control over the
> system (particularly, the system configs).  IIUC, FreedomBoxes would
> need to be slaves to the source Puppetmaster to be kept in sync.

Not necessarily. You can make Puppet apply manifests from the local 
filesystem, without a central PuppetMaster server. That's what I do with 
Vagrant + Puppet for my dev VMs in general.

> Of course, 2 won't happen if the puppets aren't pulling updates from the
> server, but if that's the case, why are you running puppets?

The reason to run Puppet without a server is that you can still check 
manifests into revision control and maintain server config alongside code.

> Also, rewriting the packaging scripts for Puppet or Chef seems like a mighty
> task.

Actually, one of Puppet's strengths is that it accommodates the 
packaging and configuration conventions of many platforms (eg. RedHat, 
Ubuntu, etc).

But, that's part of what I think would be overkill. Puppet handles a lot 
of deployment scenarios, where a Freedombox on a DreamPlug would 
probably be better served by preseeding and other Debian-specific tech.

I'd much rather load up a DreamPlug with a pre-configured filesystem 
image, than run Puppet to install packages & configure from scratch.

-- 
me at lmorchard.com
http://decafbad.com
{web,mad,computer} scientist