[chef] Re: Advice sought on Chef-ifying heterogeneous mess of Unices

[Phil Dibowitz < >]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 09:52:33PM -0400, Christopher DeMarco wrote:
> 1.  Where to start?  I began learning by putting my .emacs and .bashrc
> everywhere.  While that was cute, it quickly became more trouble than it was
> worth, because I didn't automate anything of high risk, value or volume.

You start by picking one system, and pulling one config at a time until
everything you are about on that system is controlled by Chef. Then you add
more systems.

> 2.  How do I get legacy systems into the fold?  I have every version of
> Ubuntu and OSX since 2007, and therefore my Ruby will be archaic. 

Doesn't matter, you'll use the omnibus build which includes it's own Ruby.

And with 'whyrun', you can get a pretty good idea of what's going to happen.

Yup, it's hard to have reproducable systems until you have them in config
management, and it's hard to deploy config management without reproducable
systems... but you just have to start somewhere and keep chipping away at it
until you can easily rebuild every system you have exactly as it stands today,
ancient versions and all.

-- 
Phil Dibowitz                             

 
Open Source software and tech docs        Insanity Palace of Metallica
http://www.phildev.net/                   http://www.ipom.com/

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
 and those who matter don't mind."
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