If you read this blog you may know I daily use puppet at $WORK. Puppet is made to maintain configuration on machines, but not for one shot actions. For a couple of month I used to work with fabric for this but It had a few drawbacks, mainly because you need to maintain the list of hosts you want to act on and that it hates dead hosts, even if ghantoos dropped a link showing how to get rid of this. So I replaced it with mcollective : not exactly the same (it uses an agent instead of SSH) but it dynamicaly knows which hosts are up, allows to filter on facts (from facter, the puppet companion).

Il y a des trucs, ça relève du bon sens mais on y pense pas toujours. Dans le monde des sysadmins, il y en a qui militent pour ce qu’on appelle “l’agilité”. C’est en fait appliquer certaines techniques à la base mises en place pour le développement au monde de l’administration système. Personnellement, je trouve que ce sont essentiellement des conseils de bon sens, l’expérience qui parle en somme.