4 ms·

I read about DSC a while ago, and it sounds very appealing. So far, though, I have not managed to actually get to know it personally, so to speak. We have ove

by krylon 10y ago

I read about DSC a while ago, and it sounds very appealing. So far, though, I have not managed to actually get to know it personally, so to speak. We have over the past two years tried to move as much of the configuration as possible to GPOs, although they bring their own share of problems. On Unix-like systems, one can use log files to track down problems most of the time, on Windows it seems like logging is kind of an afterthought. I especially hate it when gpresult says it did apply a certain setting when upon inspecting the system the setting clearly has not been applied (or overriden by something else? Who knows?). It is frustrating because GPOs seem like such a great idea in theory.

616c 10y ago
I have just read about it and the WMF (WMI Management Foundation) docs, whitepapers, and framework. I have not played much. GPO, and GPP (the preferences), are a nightmare. - The gpresult utility and rsop.msc tell you changes, but that does not mean much, because - GPO is async and requires sometimes a shutdown, not just a reboot (fom 5+ years of experience), so good luck dropping this crap on a dime; God help you - The Registry.pol files are not easily auditable or usable outside gpresult and rsop.msc - If you hit slow links, processing will be disabled; this is not slow all the time, but when 2% of the computers booting at 6:54AM on Tuesday it does not get applied - A whole bunch of other stuff I forget in this rant But I totally agree with you, such a pain. I have not had a lot of time for Salt, Puppet, and Chef. Whether it is in parallel or thanks to DSC (I saw some Powershell in one repo ... Ansible?) those tools are also a reality. I use an expensive SCCM alternative, but I am seriously considering proposing moving to one of the Chef/Puppet/Anisble/Salt stacks with SSH becoming a reality on Windows. All I can say is thank God.

by krylon 10y ago

616c 10y ago

I have just read about it and the WMF (WMI Management Foundation) docs, whitepapers, and framework. I have not played much. GPO, and GPP (the preferences), are a nightmare. - The gpresult utility and rsop.msc tell you changes, but that does not mean much, because - GPO is async and requires sometimes a shutdown, not just a reboot (fom 5+ years of experience), so good luck dropping this crap on a dime; God help you - The Registry.pol files are not easily auditable or usable outside gpresult and rsop.msc - If you hit slow links, processing will be disabled; this is not slow all the time, but when 2% of the computers booting at 6:54AM on Tuesday it does not get applied - A whole bunch of other stuff I forget in this rant But I totally agree with you, such a pain. I have not had a lot of time for Salt, Puppet, and Chef. Whether it is in parallel or thanks to DSC (I saw some Powershell in one repo ... Ansible?) those tools are also a reality. I use an expensive SCCM alternative, but I am seriously considering proposing moving to one of the Chef/Puppet/Anisble/Salt stacks with SSH becoming a reality on Windows. All I can say is thank God.