stevekemp

Reasonably good summary. I'd say the transport-flexibility is a fresh-take, the supplied primitives are directly inspired by CFEngine 2.x, so in terms of complexity available to get things done it is …

Looks interesting. 80% of server automation can be solved by "copy master file and restart the service that uses it". I don't see anything obvious about restarting services in jlsync, but the copying…

Several of the primitives were directly inspired by CFEngine 2.x, these include "AppendIfMissing" and "CommentLinesMatching". On that basis the names were kept to ease migration(s). I choose to belie…

Right now I have about 100 users. If it gets to 200, and I get comments/suggestions/patches then I'll be happy. Beyond that the idea of being popular/widely-used are things I've not considered. I fi…

I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of Puppet, though I've used it a little recently and I've been a regular CFEngine (2.x) user for the past few years. I hope it is useful, but if you get stuck or hav…

I'll update the documentation to be less .. heavy-handed. Thanks for the comment.

There are tools out there that will configure remote machines, using nothing more than SSH. http://ansible.cc/ is probably the most popular.

It will let you write policies which are applied each time it runs. If you schedule it to run hourly it will do the same kind of work as puppet/cfengine/chef would do - providing you write the approp…

Either the Perl artistic license, or the GPL. I figure the license doesn't matter too much, so long as I see feedback & patches - as I do - the real utility is the policies you write to control yo…

Perl has traditionally been a sysadmin-glue language, so I think it is worth mentioning in that context. Sure it might not be the new-shiny, but it still works, and thanks to CPAN there is a hell of a…

At the time the project was envisaged the name was chosen because it sorta-rhymed with the word "auto" - as in "automation". (It helps if you have a Scottish accent.)

I think, after a bit of a google, that you're referring to this: * https://github.com/krimdomu/Rex I've not sure there's too much overlap, as my initial understanding makes me think that rex carries…

Very little. I just source a small number of real configuration files from the ~/.bash/ directory: https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/tree/master/.bash …

Once upon a time somebody wanted to give me access to a new system - they ran "adduser steve", and set the password to be "steve". Two hours later, when I read the mail, that account had already been …

Add "free" and "top" there too.

When you install the package you do it as a on-off. When a configuration system does it then it will keep re-happening if anything changes. Say you install "less", and I remove it. With Chef this wi…

I've always thought 10 was the magic cut-off. I can imagine running "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" ten times in a row before I get annoyed. Any more than that and I'd want scripting. Re…

Yes, this is dog! Small world. :)

Turning off the wrong-server is a thing that bit me before I installed molly-guard. These days that, and similar, is a tweak I apply to all hosts I control. (molly-guard makes you type in the hostnam…

I live in Edinburgh, where public transport consists of a wonderful bus service (and an upcoming tram line which has been a complete fiasco from start to finish). Catching buses I've frequently notic…

Me too, building a series of HTML/PDF output pages from a docbook source, for example. Make is a lovely tool that is useful for more than just compiling source code.

I've suffered years of non-stop spamming from linkedin. "Your friend Bob from India wishes to connect with you". "Reminder, your friend Charlie from Canada recently invited .." I've received hundre…

I wrote chronicle which handles this via a CGI. Comments are dumped into text-files and they are included in the rebuild. That means there is a lag and a rebuild needed to publish them, but it works …

Yes, I've been slowly reviewing several of them: https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators Still found I had to write my own..…

It just sits and spins for me in firefox too - maybe it is too overloaded at the moment. (I did wonder if it was because the sites I tested it with were IPv6 only, but even IPv4 sites are doing nothin…

I had a password exposed via a compromise/dump of the perlmonks.org website a year or two ago. That didn't bother me since I use per-site passwords, stored in a pwsafe database. But it is an example …

And my own tool, this time in Perl, which is thoroughly documented here: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/guide/ …

I have a number of webservesr running on my host, each listening on 127.0.0.1 - this means I get security, as each webserver is running under its own UID. Rather than using apache + mod_proxy to route…

With the obvious caveat that you must have written the rules/policies/recipes for that to happen. (I've seen some cfengine repositories, for example, that assume Apache is present and just start tweak…