[clug] old-school remote sys configuration/management options

[Hugh Fisher]

On Thu, May 7, 2020 at 1:07 PM Bob Edwards via linux
<linux at lists.samba.org> wrote:
[ munch ]
> Wondering if anyone else has considered this and if anyone can suggest/
> recommend any existing frameworks or similar? I am looking for something
> that can do some/all of:

I recommend Ansible.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Ansible is perfect, not saying it
does everything,
not saying that everyone should use it. I do think it is a good fit for what Bob
wants to do.

The only network link required between controller and managed hosts is ssh,
which you have already.

The only software that needs to be installed on the managed hosts is Python.
Which is usually already present, and has other uses besides management,
so again not difficult or wasteful.

Config is expressed in YAML files, which not everyone likes. But they are
plain text and stored in the file system, not some kind of database.

Ansible comes with a lot of built-in config commands which work across the
most popular distros, handling things like "on Fedora you set the timezone
like this, on Ubuntu like that, ..." So your managed hosts don't have to be
all the same.

If you need to do something yourself, it's fairly easy to run your own custom
Python, or custom Bash/whatever, scripts, within configuration.

And you can have your progress reports from an ASCII art cow if you choose.

-- 

        cheers,
        Hugh Fisher