We too used to use components written in perl under a distributed 
environment.  As this is a new installation, and as we need to find a 
more maintainable and scalable solution, I posed the query for comments 
from those with actual field experience.

The fact that puppet does not seem to scale well is bothersome -- ruby 
is no problem as various members of the group have (some) fluency in 
many languages, including ruby, perl, python, java, and the incarnations 
of sh (sh, bash, ksh, etc. -- with current emphasis upon bash).

Our leaning now is to use cfengine.

Yasha Karant

On 02/22/2013 08:39 AM, Paul Robert Marino wrote:
> The only problem I ever had with cfengine is the documentation was
> never all that great but it is stable and scales well.
> That being said puppet is not perfect many of the stock recipes for it
> you find on the web don't scale well and to get it to scale you really
> need to be a ruby programer. My other issue with puppet is it doesn't
> provide you with a great amount of control over the timing of the
> deployment of changes unless you go to significant lengths.
> Essentially its good for a "Agile development model" environment which
> is popular with many web companies; however its a nightmare for
> mission critical 24x7x365 environments which require changes to be
> scheduled in advance.
>
> These days I'm using Spacewalk for most of what I would have used
> cfengine or puppet for in the past the only thing that it doesn't do
> out of the box is make sure that particular services are running or
> not running at boot, but there are a myriad of other simple ways to do
> that which require very little work, and if I really wanted to I could
> get spacewalk to do that as well via the soap APIs.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Graham Allan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On 2/21/2013 4:13 PM, Natxo Asenjo wrote:
>>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Graham Allan <[log in to unmask]>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Also cfengine, though that seems to be getting less fashionable... We
>>>> still use it, no compelling reasons to change so far!
>>>
>>>
>>> we take our decisions based on functionality, not fashion.
>>>
>>> Cfengine is just fine. Good performance, little dependencies, good
>>> security record (not unimportant for your infrastructure management
>>> tool and oh what a start of the year for ruby it was), and it has in
>>> place editing instead of requiring you to use yet another tool
>>> (augeas).
>>>
>>> But puppet/chef are good products too, just not good enough to justify
>>> a downgrade from the better one ;-)
>>
>>
>> Totally agree, I just meant that puppet does have more mindshare these days
>> and you'll probably find more people familiar with it. We have used cfengine
>> for 10+ years, not that we haven't discovered flaws over time but I'm
>> certainly very happy with it and see no reason to change. We have had
>> student sysadmins come in, have to learn cfengine, they also look at puppet,
>> and comment that cfengine was a good choice.
>>
>> Just as we here still write most of our support scripts etc in perl, that is
>> also unfashionable now, doesn't mean it's not the best tool for the job (fx:
>> throws bomb and runs away... :-)
>>
>> Graham