[Freedombox-discuss] Chef and Puppet experts?

[Silvio]

Em Fri, Sep 09, 2011 at 08:31:08PM -0700, FreedomBox-Discuss.NeoPhyte_Rep at OrdinaryAmerican.net escreveu:
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 6:55 PM,  nick.m.daly at gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 1:05 PM,
> > <FreedomBox-Discuss.NeoPhyte_Rep at ordinaryamerican.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 1:32 AM, Jonas Smedegaard - dr at jones.dk wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Chef and Puppet are tools to help do system administration, and the
> >>> intent of this project is not only to set the server up, but keep it
> >>> running *without* system administration.
> >>
> >> I will definitely defer to the Chef and Puppet users on this, but it
> >> is my lightly informed understanding (one presentation from one user
> >> who teaches the use of Puppet for the League Of Professional System
> >> Administrators (LOPSA) < lopsa.org >) that Puppet, at least, is
> >> designed to keep the system in conformance to a described
> >> configuration and take action if conformance is violated.
> >
> > 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.  This
> > leads me to three concerns:
> >
> > 1. It enforces centralization in a project designed to decentralize.
> >
> > 2. What happens when the Puppetmaster is taken over?  Will 300,000,000
> >   FreedomBoxes install spyware and send their BitCoin wallets to
> >   Russia?
> >
> > 3. Will it prevent users from *customizing their own systems* because
> >   they're kept in sync with the Puppetmaster?
> >
> > 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?  Also,
> > rewriting the packaging scripts for Puppet or Chef seems like a mighty
> > task.
> >
> > I could certainly be wrong in my understanding, but I'd appreciate if
> > someone with P or C experience could clarify.  Neo, would you be willing
> > to take this up with the P or C mailing lists?  Maybe ask them to post
> > clarifications here?
> >
> > Nick
> 
> Given your understanding of Puppet and Chef, I think you raise
> legitimate concerns.
> 
> I was looking to discover what Chef and Puppet expert we had here on
> the FreedomBox project and whether there was sufficient support for
> inviting some experts from their mailing lists to join the
> conversation.

I'm far from being an expert in Puppet, but I do have a SheevaPlug configured
by Puppet and it runs smoothly.

Puppet usually fills the gap between the configuration shipped in a package and
the one needed by the user/admin. The more a package config has a desired
configuration, the less puppet is needed for that purpose.

-- 
Silvio