System Center Configuration Manager’s (SCCM) Desired State Configuration is exactly what you’re describing. If you have no budget for this (like your question makes it seem) you can leverage PowerShell DSC instead. System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) doesn’t factor in here- it’s a monitoring and alerting platform, not a configuration management one. (Note that the … Read more
If it came in MSI format for easy installation to Windows workstations, and could be managed by GPO and Apple Open Directory then it would be perfect. It would also need to work well with things like Sharepoint, but I suspect that’s an issue for the people designing sites in Sharepoint rather than Mozilla. I … Read more
Ansible’s Git Module will do this for you as far as the “pull” is concerned, just make sure that the user that is running the command has key-based access to the git repo. You can specify the user that the command runs as by adding the “sudo_user” parameter to your task: – name: Get stuff … Read more
I’d probably use Ansible. It’s a very simple configuration management / orchestration engine that’s far simpler to get started with than Puppet (Puppet used to be my go-to choice for this, but not always now, having discovered Ansible). The benefit of Ansible here is that it communicates directly over SSH, so you’d be able to … Read more
Nope, it’s not defeating the purpose. I, in fact, use Ansible to set up single servers for hobby/side-project use quite frequently. It allows me to keep a version-controlled, repeatable, self-documenting configuration for the server.
You can also add this into your Vagrantfile: ansible.verbose = “vvv” this would need to go where you’re kicking off the provisioning, like this: config.vm.provision “ansible” do |ansible| ansible.verbose = “vvv” end This sets the verbose option of ansible: -v, –verbose verbose mode (-vvv for more, -vvvv to enable connection debugging) Setting this to vvvv … Read more
Edit This question and answer are years old. The definitive best practices are taught via the Learn Chef Rally self-paced training modules produced by Chef Software, Inc. The bulk of the original answer is below. In this answer, “Chef” or “chef-client” usually refers to Chef Infra, the product. Opscode renamed to Chef Software, Inc in … Read more
In Linux land, people are pursuing a couple of different strategies: Configuration constraint systems, like cfengine or puppet or chef. These are similar to windows GPOs. Point being that all the server configuration is intentionally documented in a single place and you know at what granularity (server room, group, specific server) the policy is enacted. … Read more
Once upon a time I had an opportunity to decide on a naming scheme. So I went round and asked my developers, who after all were the people who had to work with these names on a day-to-day basis, whether they preferred functional names (that is, names which represent, in some encoded form, the purpose … Read more