[et-mgmt-tools] [ANNOUNCE] Func 0.0.12

[David Lutterkort]

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 19:12 -0400, Michael DeHaan wrote:
> >>     * Have you ever tried to manage a large number of systems with SSH?
> >>       Have you wanted a better way?
> >>     
> >
> > Anybody who manages their machines that way (and thinks they are truly
> > managing them) needs to go back to sysadmin school.
> 
> As I'm running a bit late and need to get going, I'll leave that for 
> someone else to respond to in detail -- but there are a lot of extremely 
> intelligent sysadmins running thousands of machine configurations out 
> there, many of which who are on these lists.   A couple of them have 
> been working with us to build this.   They've mentioned they've wanted 
> better tools around key exchange, and ways to perform one-offs and for 
> data gathering -- things that don't fit well into the cfengine/puppet 
> kind of models.

Note that I took exception with the claim that this has anything to do
with managing systems, not the tool itself. As I said initially, for
casual environments where one-offs are acceptable, func seems fine. But
the claims in the announcement go way beyond that. 

There are plenty of places that try to manage their systems func-style,
and when they realize what pain they are inflicting on themselves it is
often too late to change course because the cost of switching to a more
appropriate tool is prohibitive.

> Anyhow, this is part of the reason we're not putting func explicitly on 
> a systems management email list ... Func has uses other than systems 
> management, for other apps that want a generic key exchange mechanism 
> and modular XMLRPC framework.  That's what we're building.

Why all the claims about 'a better way to manage a large number of
systems' and 'fed up with CIM/WBEM' then ? It sounds like 'distributed
scripting framework' describes func much better.

BTW, a simple, standardized (in Fedora and related distros) way to
distribute and manage SSL certs would be really valuable; have you
thought about breaking that functionality out separately ?

David