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Couple of related questions: 1) Many people seem to be recommending Puppet / Chef. How many servers or installs do you need before this is a good ROI? (Over us

Couple of related questions: 1) Many people seem to be recommending Puppet / Chef. How many servers or installs do you need before this is a good ROI? (Over using odd bash scripts or cPanel/WHM) 2) Am I right in thinking kernel updates don't get applied until the server is rebooted? If so, how / when do you manage this?

stevekemp 14y ago
I've always thought 10 was the magic cut-off. I can imagine running "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" ten times in a row before I get annoyed. Any more than that and I'd want scripting. Really there's nothing stopping you from automating "some" machines and later pushing that out to the rest of your hosts. (Or just setting up trivial automation "configure NTP", "Disable root logins", "Append 'steve' to sudoers" - and keeping doing the rest by hand until you're confident.) FWIW I use my toy configuration system, slaughter: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/ http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/
lmm 14y ago
Puppet/chef are certainly worth it for 3 machines. If it's an important machine they're worth it for even 1 machine (so that you have a disaster recovery procedure).
justincormack 14y ago
Re 2 yes that is true. You need to build this in to your maintenance.
- dave1010uk 14y ago
  Do you just reboot all machines every month or so or do you keep track of when kernel security patches come out some how?
  - justincormack 14y ago
    Given that there have been real kernel security issues recently I would reboot sooner. You can do a risk assessment per issue. Monthly automated doesn't seem the best option.
kelnos 14y ago
I think it's more about future planning. If you only have a few hosts now, but know that in the future you'll have many, then you're just going to have to rewrite all your bash scripts anyway. Might as well do them "right" from the start. Learning Chef isn't that hard, and it won't take you that much longer for the first host.
crucialfelix 14y ago
I wasted several days trying to get a good puppet setup. In the end it still needs more work, and the deploy system is complicated. I only have 4 boxes to manage. Ansible looks great. Much lighter weight but it can still scale up. Puppet and chef would both benefit by supporting single run light weight modes of usage.
- pindi 14y ago
  Puppet does have a single run mode of usage: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/apply.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/apply.html I use it to manage just 5 servers, with a Fabric script that rsyncs the manifests up to the servers then runs `puppet apply` to apply the changes.
  - crucialfelix 14y ago
    true, and that's exactly what I was doing. rsync and then run puppet apply. that's just a lot of grinding if you only made one little typo. and I see here I have capfiles and a system to bootstrap a new server. way too much stuff for this scale. (4 servers)

stevekemp 14y ago

I've always thought 10 was the magic cut-off. I can imagine running "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" ten times in a row before I get annoyed. Any more than that and I'd want scripting. Really there's nothing stopping you from automating "some" machines and later pushing that out to the rest of your hosts. (Or just setting up trivial automation "configure NTP", "Disable root logins", "Append 'steve' to sudoers" - and keeping doing the rest by hand until you're confident.) FWIW I use my toy configuration system, slaughter: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/ http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/

lmm 14y ago

Puppet/chef are certainly worth it for 3 machines. If it's an important machine they're worth it for even 1 machine (so that you have a disaster recovery procedure).

justincormack 14y ago

Re 2 yes that is true. You need to build this in to your maintenance.

dave1010uk 14y ago
Do you just reboot all machines every month or so or do you keep track of when kernel security patches come out some how?
- justincormack 14y ago
  Given that there have been real kernel security issues recently I would reboot sooner. You can do a risk assessment per issue. Monthly automated doesn't seem the best option.

kelnos 14y ago

I think it's more about future planning. If you only have a few hosts now, but know that in the future you'll have many, then you're just going to have to rewrite all your bash scripts anyway. Might as well do them "right" from the start. Learning Chef isn't that hard, and it won't take you that much longer for the first host.

crucialfelix 14y ago

I wasted several days trying to get a good puppet setup. In the end it still needs more work, and the deploy system is complicated. I only have 4 boxes to manage. Ansible looks great. Much lighter weight but it can still scale up. Puppet and chef would both benefit by supporting single run light weight modes of usage.

pindi 14y ago
Puppet does have a single run mode of usage: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/apply.html http://docs.puppetlabs.com/man/apply.html I use it to manage just 5 servers, with a Fabric script that rsyncs the manifests up to the servers then runs `puppet apply` to apply the changes.
- crucialfelix 14y ago
  true, and that's exactly what I was doing. rsync and then run puppet apply. that's just a lot of grinding if you only made one little typo. and I see here I have capfiles and a system to bootstrap a new server. way too much stuff for this scale. (4 servers)