FAI + SaltStack anybody?

[Andrew Ruthven]

On Fri, 2023-10-06 at 20:02 +0200, Henning Glawe wrote:
> p.s.: call me biased, as I implemented ``softupdate`` almost 20 years ago
> and use it since then as a configuration manager for a few 1k hosts in
> various contexts

softupdate is very handy. We used to use it at work (and I still do at home)
for building Linux VServers, and I have happily used it to bootstrap cloud
based instances.

The difficulty I run into, and which others might as well, is there is broad
knowledge of Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Chef, etc. as well as there being many
many modules/recipes/whatever for these tools. Neither of these so much for
FAI[0], so the tool used for on-going configuration management tends to be
one of these other tools.

At work we have a similar model as other people in this thread. FAI to
handle the hardware and get a server into a state that it is ready to be
taken over by configuration management.

For operating system upgrades we do reinstalls rather than dist-upgrades, so
FAI also needs to be able to rebuild a server - hence having various secrets
able to be deployed during a build.

Cheers,
Andrew

[0] Hmm, is there scope for sharing classes for doing common useful tasks? I
have some I can most probably share. Could FAI have a "plugins" directory
that mimics the top level of a profile and allow for contained plugins to be
installed?

-- 
Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand
andrew at etc.gen.nz         |
Catalyst Cloud:           | This space intentionally left blank
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