push a few config files to dozen or so servers

[Paul Mather]

On Feb 6, 2015, at 5:31 PM, parv <parv at pair.com> wrote:

> in message <6CC9FCD8-EB12-4DD1-A76E-8F43C044340F at ultra-secure.de>,
> wrote Rainer Duffner thusly...
>> 
> ...
>> I???ve always wanted to try ansible, which looks like it has
>> decent support for FreeBSD.
>> 
>> Anybody got experience with that?
> 
> From Dan L (not me) ...
> 
>  http://dan.langille.org/2013/12/22/ansible-versus-salt/
> 
>  https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Adlangille%20ansible&src=typd
> 
> 
>  - parv


One of the reasons I've been looking at Salt recently is because of this post in December 2014 by Craig Rodrigues, who set up and maintains the FreeBSD project's Jenkins cluster:

	https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-testing/2014-December/000693.html

Going by that post, it seems that he is leaning towards using Salt to manage the cluster.

My hope is that if jenkins.freebsd.org is using Salt for infrastructure management then perhaps FreeBSD support might get a boost in the Salt community.

I'm previously familiar with Puppet and am looking at Salt at the moment.  There are similar concepts between the two, e.g., pillars = hiera; grains = facter; etc.  I haven't looked at Ansible very closely, but it seems that Salt also covers the same ground in its strong focus on orchestration.

I think all these systems are very good in their own right, but in the end community support for your preferred OS is paramount.  I'm hoping that FreeBSD looking at using Salt for the Jenkins cluster might boost FreeBSD support in the Salt community.

Cheers,

Paul.