On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 06:43:36PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
Anyway, BeefTaco is a follow-on to (a revival of) TACO -- not of do-not-track.
i guess i'll stick with abine's pluing then.
it's my generic solution to the "I'm bored of making yet another yank-paste-edit config stanza" problem - convert to a simple format for the variable data, a perl script, and a makefile.
I might have to get serious about improving my facility with Perl, at which I still suck, having gotten by with sed/awk/etc. for a dog's age. Yes, I know, past time to get comfortable with the sysadmin's Swiss Army knife. I could trot out excuses, but they wouldn't be interesting.
if you can cope with sed and awk, perl is no big deal. you've already got 99.9999% of it, the rest is just a little practice. which is easy as it's kind of like an easier awk with better regexp handling and a huge library (CPAN) of pre-written modules....just about any programming task you can think of is probably already available as a cpan module.
My percepti8on, FWIW: Chef is not a good idea unless you are really comfortable at writing ruby routinely. I.e., it's developer-focussed. Puppet is the other way; it's sysadmin-focussed. That's a vague handwave, but in my experience generally true.
your perception roughly matches what i'd concluded after reading about it. i've never used it or even played with it, but reading was enough to make me suspect i wouldn't like chef at all. puppet i can deal with, even if i'd prefer something more perl-ish in outlook and design philosophy (or at a pinch, more python-ish).
might be time for another search for an alternative to puppet....hmmm, this looks like a good starting list.
Have a look at ansible if you want to see a fresh and well-balanced approach. http://www.ansibleworks.com/
after a bit of reading around the site, it looks good. and while i'm no great fan of python(*), i like python a hell of a lot better than ruby. my initial impressions of ansible weren't great, though. it's yet another web site that doesn't work without javascript - what is wrong with webdevs that they don't understand that links only need a href tags, not js? they've also done a pretty good job of hiding the license information, the only mention of GPL or open-source is a mention on the Get Ansible page. if i hadn't been specifically looking for licensing info I would have assumed that it was either proprietary or cripple/demo-ware. it is, however, GPL, and there are ansible packages in debian testing/unstable, as well as ubuntu and redhat. i'll play with it in some VMs and get a feel for it. thanks for the tip. (*) most python-based systems tools i've worked with leaave the distinct impression that as sysadmins, python devs really should stick to their day job - openstack being a good example. it works but it's kind of clumsy and not really designed to be controlled from the command-line (getopt handling by tools written in python seems consistently dreadful)...and there's an obsession with json, even embedding it in text fields in the nova and keystone databases rather than properly normalised tables. that's partly due to native python idiom, and partly the django web-dev everything-is-MVC blinders. OTOH, python is a pleasant and fun and overall-good-and-i-like-it language to program in - even if it isn't as good as perl for the kinds of things i usually write. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>