[colug-432] Setting Up New Servers

[Scott Merrill]

> Hi everybody!

Hi Steve!

> Is there anyone here who has ever set up more than two servers? I am
> curious about what you may have thought of or done in terms of
> automating the process.

There are a lot of tools available for handling configuration management.

Wikipedia has a good list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_configuration_management_software


The most popular solutions are generally Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt.

I use Puppet professionally every day, and I can’t imagine managing servers without it anymore.
   http://www.puppetlabs.com/

There can be a bit of a learning curve with any of these tools.  If you choose to try one, it will often feel like a lot of work for little benefit at first.  If you’re only managing a few things on two servers, configuration management may indeed be overkill for you.  You can probably manually execute the necessary steps to configure your servers quick enough, but that means you need to manually configure your third, or fourth server as well.

The real benefit of these solutions is that you can quickly repeat your work across dozens or hundreds or thousands of systems.  It also helps you rebuild systems after a failure, so there is value even for hobbyists working with a couple of servers.

Cheers,
Scott