[colug-432] Setting Up New Servers

[Rick Hornsby]

> On Apr 16, 2015, at 09:59, Chris Embree <cembree at ez-as.net> wrote:
> 
> I use Kickstart for base OS stuff plus authorized keys.  From there
> you can pick and choose your config mgt tool.  I've used cfEngine and
> Ansible with success.
> 
> Yes, that means you have to track down all of the changes and make
> them in your Cfg tool.  It also means you can do that for 1-N
> additional servers.  If you're just doing a new one every year or so,
> you might just keep writing things down.

In a small environment (a couple to no more than a handful of hosts) and a relatively small amount of post-provision config, I might use a shell script.  Beyond that, I’d look at a config management tool like cfEngine/Ansible/Puppet/Chef.  Shell scripts really don’t scale all that well.

Puppet and Chef can be a little overkill for a few hosts or simple configuration changes.  I’m very new to puppet, but you don’t need a full puppet or chef infrastructure to use them.  You can copy your puppet modules/manifests onto your client system and tell the puppet agent to use a local (or NFS/SMB/AFS hosted) manifest to set your configuration.  With chef, you can use chef-solo.

I’m still teaching myself puppet, but one of the things I really like is that you can describe what you want and puppet makes sure it happens, or bails if it does not (Chef can do the same).  When you’re trying to set specific parameters in a file, using shell scripts you have do a bunch more work in terms of checking “does this exist?” and sometimes end up writing complex (brittle?) regex for grep/sed.

Both Puppet and Chef can use ruby templates, and both have ways (community written modules, cookbooks) for managing common things like sudoers.



> 
> $0.02.  YMMV.
> 
> On 4/16/15, Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck at postpro.net> wrote:
>> Hi everybody!
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> For example getting the sudoers file the way you want it... Adding your
>> public key... Configuring your bashrc file... You know, all the little
>> things you do to make the server yours. Not necessarily software
>> installation although that could be done also.
>> 
>> I am looking for something that will make the job a little easier to do
>> than simply writing down on a piece of paper every single thing I do to
>> configure the box and then following my notes for the next server I set
>> up.
>> 
>> Maybe there is a method of running some sort of diff between the two
>> servers that would focus only on the kinds of things a server admin
>> would do the first day (assuming he could remember it all, and not
>> necessarily every single difference between every single file, which
>> would of course be overwhelming.
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