From: Robert Nesius <nesius@...>
Date: 2004-09-01T00:51:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for system administration


On Aug 31, 2004, at 6:53 AM, James Edward Gray II wrote:

> On Aug 31, 2004, at 7:43 AM, David Ross wrote:
>
>> Trying to stick with the stock from the maintainers
>> can be quite silly for some software.
>
> If a system administrator maintains 30+ similarly configured boxes and 
> decides to go with one non-standard module he gives himself 30+ 
> installs to do immediately, 30+ versions to track, and a permanent 
> extra step every time a box is rebuilt or added.  Naturally, this is 
> their job and they have the tools to help them do it (hopefully), but 
> it's still not a decision made lightly for obvious reasons.
>

No sane sys admin would administrate an environment this way.
Okay..  *I* would never administrate an environment this way.
I do administrate an environment with 8000 machines and five different 
Arch/OS combinations.
Even if I kept the tools local to the machine, I'd never do this by 
hand.  I'd automate it.

-Rob