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

[Andreas Bauer]

Hi Bob,

We're using Ansible + Git + Check_MK for monitoring (mostly with local
checks).  That serves us well.  As far as downsides of Ansible are
concerned, two sort of related ones come to mind:

1. Especially for interactive installs (think: interactive install
scripts of commercial servers), you often resort to adding simple
shell commands to your Ansible files, which in the long run won't be
as maintainable.

2. Maintainability of Ansible files is generally a bit frustrating at
first, because the syntax of modules has kept changing frequently in
the past.  (Once you get the hang of it, you can usually quickly work
your way around such issues and know which syntax is likely to be
longlived and which isn't, but it did frustrate me and my team at
first.)

But overall, I wouldn't want to do administration without it anymore.

Best wishes,

Andi

--
Andreas Bauer, a at pspace.org
http://baueran.multics.org/