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by throwanem 3307 days ago
I've used those scripts - I've written those scripts! - and I have no idea what you're talking about. Puppet is a marvel, and when it's too heavyweight for the task at hand, there's Ansible. Both are far, far preferable to

    me@homebox $ for host in foo bar baz; do cat random_stuff_who_knows_if_it_works.sh | ssh $host 'bash -'; done
like we did in the old days you're talking about.
3 comments
marcosdumay 3307 days ago
Immutable configuration (puppet) is a godsend. No more digging into backups of etc and wondering who wrote something there, when (was it before or after the emergency?) and why. Now you place everything into a repository with commit logs like any piece of code.

That said, immutable configuration is static, so the need for grumpy admin style scripts did not go away. It just reduced.

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etatoby 3307 days ago
You can have my cryptic Bash one-liners when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

But yeah, I agree that Ansible is the minimum that should be in place.

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throwanem 3307 days ago
Oh, I still perpetrate cryptic Bash one-liners myself, on a more or less daily basis. What's nice today, by comparison with the before time, is having a realistic option to do otherwise, and having that option not be Perl.
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marcosdumay 3307 days ago
> and having that option not be Perl

Oh, Python is quite old already :)

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throwanem 3307 days ago
Not better, though. Just different.
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eeZah7Ux 3307 days ago
Old bash scripts != cryptic one liners.

I had used very readable and documented scripts that would build images, boot VMs, deploy on physicals, configure network devices with hundreds of SLOC by simply calling the right CLI tools instead of (re)writing many thousands of lines in $language.

I was in a company around 2002 doing immutable deployments by updating images from git-tracked config files for whole datacenters.

E.g. calling to debootstrap takes few lines. Generating an ISO. Configuring PXE to serve it...

As a funny non-example: https://github.com/p8952/bocker

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throwanem 3306 days ago
That must've been amazing, back in the day! The organization was clearly far, far ahead of the curve, not least in that they adopted Git three years or more prior to its initial public release. Fantastic as it no doubt was, though, I'm glad that such awe-inspiring wizardry is no longer required to achieve a similar quality of result.
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