Configuration Management Options

[Gregory Orange]

On 18/03/15 03:44, Alex Thomas wrote:
> Looking for some information on using various configuration management
> tools on freebsd. I have see reports of using puppet and have also heard
> that the freebsd cluster is using saltstack. Can anyone point me in the
> direction of getting more information on how well each of these run on
> freebsd?

We happily use Puppet to manage entire machines, including things like 
freebsd-update, package installation, services, configuration files, and 
even a few user accounts. Support for packages has improved with the 
move to pkgng, so we no longer use our custom built portupgrade package 
provider. We use this module instead:
https://forge.puppetlabs.com/zleslie/pkgng

If we were now starting from scratch, I'm not sure whether we would use 
Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Chef or something else, and if Puppet then I'm 
not sure if we would start out by managing entire machines as we do, or 
just start with smaller components and then build up as required. But 
we're not, so I don't have to make those decisions right now!

HTH,
Greg.