I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
Ansible.
TheForeman.
What utter trash.
Why ansible? It’s the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can’t build a premade image. I’ve tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.
Because it’s trash. It’s sad. It’s a slow, unreliable mishmash of suck that I loathe to work with.
Not needing an agent?!? You write “caching shit so we can run our remediation in under a century and one pass” funny. I build new machines in 3-4 minutes with a full remediation and like 300 data points to check with the good tools. But it takes tower 3-4 min to net started before actually doing anything, and then another few minutes for ~30 datapoints. I do NOT want to see it with an actual payload.
The only thing going for Ansible is the network effect of “everybody using it” and especially not learning well enough about anything else.
Not op but I’ve moved on to nixos, or I use nix for managing the home folder on Ubuntu / Darwin machines.
Disclaimer: I’m a software dev not a sys admin, though I manage a number of machines for dev and home lab stuff.
After the high learning curve, its so much easier keeping my systems in sync.
Super easy to rollback on a bad upgrade.
Everything has its quirks. It’s quite hard to manage secrets in Nix without dropping them to nix store. Sops-nix is probably closest to ansible-vault, but I’ve yet to see some good solution for short lived secrets. (For example secrets that are only needed to deploy something but not to run it)
Nixos is great, but unfortunately I can’t use it at work. I have migrated my home server infra to it though and plan to migrate my desktop the next time I have a free evening.
What’s wrong with ansible? I use it day to day. I get the usual gripes about python syntax but all in all its an ok tool.
They also mention Foreman. I like Ansible, but anything in combination with Foreman was terrible experience, so perhaps it’s that.
Also you can do terrible Ansible configuration that’s then nightmare to maintain.
Totally get The Foreman. Worst piece of garbage I’ve ever used.
I do use ansible to set up my own repository management/lifecycle environment servers nowadays, specifically to get rid of Foreman.
Why do you dislike ansible? Got to say that I love it, especially compared to stuff like Puppet and SaltStack.
Ansible isn’t that bad, it’s just quirky.