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Automation is useful, even in homelab environments, since manual configuration introduces human errors, and automation can speed up recovery from disasters. Thi
by mt_ 4y ago
Automation is useful, even in homelab environments, since manual configuration introduces human errors, and automation can speed up recovery from disasters.
This article is just for the sake of it. The author calls it old administration, but he better call it outdated and inefficient Linux administration.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoAutomation is still subject to human errors, and can propagate them much farther.
- sophacles 4y agoSo do like you would in old-school, have a staging/testing environment. Nice thing about automation, is you can just rebuild that easily to a clean state, rather than having to remember how staging is different from prod. And as you write your automation and find those human errors, you put it in code so that you don't forget a step. Nothing more frustrating than thinking you've solved the problem in staging only to run a command in prod that breaks things more, and in a different way, because it turns out the fix was a combination of earlier experimentation plus the command you just ran.
- eternityforest 4y agoAutomation makes things repeatable. If errors happen, in the "cattle not pets" mindset, you nuke it from orbit and let Ansible make you a new one from a clean Debian/RHEL image. As long as your backup of user data is good(Better double check that script, if you have a script for that) it doesn't matter. As long as you avoid technology that takes more than a few minutes to set up, rebuilding is trivial.