[BozemanLUG] BozemanGLUG June Meeting

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

----- Original Message  by Rob Potter -----
> I am planning to be there. I am no expert on SNAPS but do use them.
> Might be able to provide basic information.

Great.  Thanks for volunteering.  If you could bring a laptop (or I could create a VM for you to use if you tell me your preferred distro, release, and desktop environment ahead of time), it would be nice if you could show it to us.

> If there is time I wouldn't mind learning how to create an ansible
> host file and maybe see some basic usage.

Done.  I can show both Linux and Windows host management with it... but only so far as fairly simple ad-hoc use goes... as I haven't done any real automated deployment with it because I just haven't had that use case yet.  That use case is definitely easy to explain and understand at a high level without getting into the configuration details.  That level of detail will remain an exercise for the reader and there are repositories of real world recipes for pretty much everything.

> I've heard if you pay RH for ansible server you can also have a gui interface. Does anyone
> know if true? Can a Cent OS user have a gui? Pro's vs. Con's of a gui?

The pay GUI you speak of, that is web-based, is named Ansible Tower.  There *IS* a FLOSS upstream project for Ansible Tower (like oVirt is to Red Hat Virtualization, etc) but the name escapes me at the moment and I want to save some of the mystery for the meeting.  I have not used it and I haven't watched any videos yet that would give me a reasonable understanding of its ease-of-use vs. complexity and flexibility.

I do believe that Red Hat has also integrated Ansible into both their revamped web-based management system they offer users with small numbers of RHEL hosts to manage... and their Red Hat Satellite product that they charge enterprises with larger numbers of hosts to manage.  And yes, there is a FLOSS upstream version of Satellite... and also the name escapes me at the moment.  I'm guessing you'd be more interested in the FLOSS Satellite product than Ansible Tower... if monitoring and managing systems is your goal.  Ansible Tower is more about automating installation and deployments with reproducibility... than desktop end system management.  Not knowing either of those two complex products very well, I'll guess that there is probably quite a bit of feature overlap between them.  BTW, SUSE also offers a system like Satellite for their Enterprise customers (that's right, I don't recall the name of it either)... and it is actually a fork of Satellite.  In SUSE's defense, they claim they tried to work with Red Hat to get SUSE's patches upstreamed but say that Red Hat refused to accept them so they had to fork.

One point to clarify, to the best of my knowledge, Ansible Tower is very distro agnostic with regards to what client systems it can manage... and may even also include Microsoft Windows management support (not sure).  I'm less sure about Satellite.  Satellite might be RHEL and RHEL clone only.

BTW, my goal with buying the burgers isn't an attempt to recruit anyone... but is to get informed meat eater opinions from people I trust.  You can't be informed unless you really give it a try at least once.  Should I put you down for a whole burger? :)  I know, I know.  A grocery store hamburger... two hours after it was prepared... and then reheated... in a sub-standard ambiance venue, doesn't sound very appealing at all.  It isn't just the plant-based / non-meat aspect one has to get past.  My offer was probably doomed to fail from the start.  I know, I'll just buy four of them and then people can poke at them and see other's reactions and then decide if they want to try it or not.  At the very least, no onions for Rob. :)

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]