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My experience is that trying to build "the silver bullet" always inevitably results in reinventing the wheel by finding a piece of software which solves the sam
by ktpsns 7y ago
My experience is that trying to build "the silver bullet" always inevitably results in reinventing the wheel by finding a piece of software which solves the same problems after weeks of coding. That's probably why the classical "Unix admin approach" -- a collection of scripts to manage textual config files -- is probably the most flexible one, when combined with standard (for file formats, versioning, etc -- depends on your preferences). Basic scripting with JSON/Yaml/tenplating/git/systemd/etc is the way I would setup larger computer systems nowadays. I've seen this being successful in institutes with ~200 users and according computing facilities.
- avaika 7y agoCollection of scripts might be quick and fun solution, but it isn't really reliable (unless it's ansible / chef level of scripts).
- ktpsns 7y agoThe reliability comes if the tool is mature -- it doesn't matter whether it's a collection of CLI scripts or a big web frontend. In any way, it's clear that "a bunch of scripts" will remain the opposite of a big framework such as Ansible. But it doesn't neccessarily need to be worse. Equipped with a good documentation, it might be much better tailored to save the administrator her time.