{"id":1066,"date":"2011-01-27T13:37:28","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2011-03-01T15:56:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T20:56:57","slug":"on-configuration-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/2011\/01\/27\/on-configuration-management\/","title":{"rendered":"On Configuration Management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This started out as a thought to me late last night while reading the <a href=\"http:\/\/bitfieldconsulting.com\/puppet-vs-chef?page=1\">comments<\/a> to the quite poorly developed &#8220;Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons why Puppet wins&#8221; blog post.  The plan was to calmly sit down and write up my thoughts on some of these things.  Instead, I blasted it all out in the comment thread there, and am just re-pasting here.<\/em><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&#8230; being able to build these tools (Puppet, Chef, etc) from source is MANDATORY. This notion that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153if you are building from source, you are doing it wrong\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is a) total bullshit and b) completely vapid when you are not offering build tarballs for all OSes you claim your tool runs on. Where\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your Solaris pkg tarball? Yes, build from source. What if I want our CM shit in \/usr\/local\/cm-tools, built with options for our environment? Yes, build from source. What if I want, as <strong>anyone<\/strong> should want, the Ruby used for our CM tools decoupled from the OS-provided Ruby which can change out from under me? BUILD. FROM. SOURCE. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re rolling out a <strong>configuration management<\/strong> framework for sanity in your environment, and in the process a lot of you are doing it with the same old braindead methodology.<\/p>\n<p>Configuration management software is something to be installed and <strong>left alone<\/strong> unless a serious security vulnerability or bug <strong>that actually affects your environment<\/strong> is found (not talking about config changes). It is a setup effort that should last more than a year without being dicked with.<\/p>\n<p><strong>MAJOR RANT<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I am <strong>amazed<\/strong> at some of the hackish mentality shown by so many people doing CM work or rollouts. On one hand, you say you \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Get It\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because you are doing CM instead of firefighting or meatforcing deployments. On the other hand, you cut your teeth dicking around with every latest release candidate of every Linux kernel or tool known to man and just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t keep your hands between your ass and a chair. Listen, I *don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want* the latest stable version of your CM tool, released 3 weeks ago, installed. I want the version I am using already, that I tested thoroughly with our environment, and that *works perfectly fine on my N-hundred boxes*. I will never, ever, stop being at odds with this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Linux Generation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of needless upgraders, let alone the ones who claim to understand system stability and interdependencies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This started out as a thought to me late last night while reading the comments to the quite poorly developed&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[38,41,39,37],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysadmin","tag-chef","tag-configuration-management","tag-opscode","tag-puppet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1227,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kickflop.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}