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I'm finding that another important step is this one: apt-get install etckeeper && cd /etc && etckeeper init Keeps your /etc under version control so you know

• agumonkey 10y ago
  Ha yeah. I wonder how it's not installed by default, it's such a bliss (until nixos becames the defacto standard)
• eropple 10y ago
  I used to use this, but I found that it's significantly less useful than a git repo with my server-specific Chef cookbook in it. Manually modifying servers was never a good idea; it's worse now, even with tools like this.
  • jboynyc 10y ago
    I suppose that's true, but in the field where I work (social science), servers are mostly spun up to scratch an immediate and idiosyncratic itch, so configuration tends to happen organically. I agree that's probably not a good idea, and learning Pupchefsible is well worth the effort. In the meantime, though, there's at least some degree of reproducibility with etckeeper.
    • eropple 10y ago
      I do this stuff professionally, and I've learned the hard way that you either have a reproducible environment or you don't. etckeeper isn't reproducible. Actually rolling back with something like etckeeper is much, much more likely to break something (by deleting a config file used by a newer service, say) than to save you. If it did something like separate branches for each service or component within /etc I might be more sympathetic...but at that point you have half of a CM system already and might as well just go the rest of the way. If you need reproducibility without a CM framework, keep backups of your machines.