Which open source configuration management tool should I use?

Comments and additions welcome! Please email me.

Best,
Aleksey

Give Your Sysadmin Career a Boost with the LOPSA Mentorship Program

Mount Laurel, NJ, 22 September 2010 –

LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators, a professional sys admin organization, unveils a mentorship program. In fulfillment of LOPSA’s mission to support the practice of system administration, LOPSA’s sys admin members volunteer as mentors and as program coordinators. Anyone can join the program as a protege; membership in LOPSA in not required. This is truly a community service.

How does the LOPSA Mentor Program work?

The LOPSA Mentor Program provides a “match-maker” service for LOPSA members who want to be a mentor with new, eager, system administrators that want to learn. Potential proteges write a one-paragraph description of a project they want to be mentored on. Mentors list their availability and a brief description of their skills and interests. A volunteer coordinator brings the two together.

The pair is free to work out their own goals, timeline, schedule, and so on. When the project is complete, the protege writes a brief description of the project for distribution.

Projects should be well-defined with a clear end-point. For example, “Set up RequestTracker for my university helpdesk” or “Set up MS-Exchange with fail-over for 20 users.” After the project is complete what happens is up to you. We hope that by working together on a project you start a relationship that lasts many years.

What do mentors do? Mentors are expected to help the protege define the project goals, then let them work independently. Mentors are there to answer questions and coach, not provide dedicated training or technical support. It is important that proteges learn to learn.

Become a LOPSA Protege!

It can be lonely starting your career as a system administrator. Yes, there are books, mailing lists, and web sites — but having a mentor can lead to a professional relationship that can last a lifetime. The LOPSA Mentor Program is a “match maker” service that helps you find a mentor. You work with the mentor to define the project’s goals and see the project to completion. After that, LOPSA steps out of the way. It is our hope that this starts a mentor-protege relationship that lasts longer than just one project.

When you are done, all LOPSA asks is that you write a 1-paragraph summary for us to put on our “wall of success.” Simple!

About LOPSA

The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) is an independent nonprofit corporation dedicated to advancing the practice of system administration. The mission of the organization is to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners and to serve the public through education and outreach on system administration issues.

LOPSA provides educational and networking opportunities, a forum for support and ideas, and an active community engaged in discussion of sysadmin issues. As a member driven organization, LOPSA’s best ideas come from its membership; IT professionals looking to influence the field of IT can join LOPSA to find other IT professionals to collaborate on projects, advance the state of the art, and search for and share the best practices in IT.

For more information on LOPSA, visit http://www.lopsa.org, or contact the executive office: 15000 Commerce Parkway, Suite C, Mt. Laurel, NJ 08054; Phone: 856-439-0500 or toll free at 800-285-2141; Fax: 856-439-0525; E-mail: info@lopsa.org.

Relative Origin of Cfengine, Puppet and Chef

Relative Origin of Cfengine, Chef and Puppet

In Cfengine, creator Mark Burgess pioneered the idea of using a configuration description language to describe desired state on heterogeneous Unix and Unix-like systems. This language included “classes” or built-in if/then tests to control when and where the configuration should apply.

In Cfengine 2, Mark introduced ideas of convergence to a desired state and self-healing (computer immunology).

Puppet was created by a power Cfengine 2 user Luke Kanies out of his dissatisfaction with Cfengine 2 and Mark’s management of the project. Next generation tool after Cfengine 2, Puppet is graph-based and model-driven and has a very simple DSL language (designed to be simple, safe and human readable) and now a Ruby DSL (for additional power and flexibility). Puppet has a large and active community.

Chef rose out of the cloudy Ruby-on-Rails world. Chef was created by Adam Jacobs, a power Puppet user, out of dissatisfaction with Puppet’s non-deterministic (by default – it can be made deterministic) graph-based ordering. Sequence of execution in Chef is tightly ordered. The most exciting innovation in Chef is cloud provisioning capability (ability to instantiate cloud VM’s, install and configure the OS, and install the application – all automatically).

Cfengine 3 is a complete rewrite of Cfengine 2 completely addressing the pain points of Cfengine 2 (such as baroqueness of language syntax) and moving the entire field forward. Mark greatly simplified the language and introduced Promise Theory, a way to think about configuration as promises to be in a desired state.

Cfengine 3 innovations are Knowledge Management (making the intention clear, documenting who cares about an aspect of configuration or what it effects, and enabling extensive sysadmin commenting that accompanies the configuration) and Business Integration (such as enabling auditing compliance or enabling ITIL processes).

Cfengine 3 also brings new capabilities such as database integration (control of database state) and native support for managing Windows registry state.

P.S. Be assured development and continued enhancement is ongoing in all three. This graph only tracks major version numbers. Puppet is continuing to make its own way.