Naturally management software is not a hobbyist endeavor, it is written by software developers and systems administrators. The idea that OSS software is exclusively created by hobbyists is FUD, and frankly is insulting and ignorant. This does not diminish anyone who does things in their spare time, but is a typical line out of the Microsoft bible. The idea that AD is “goodness” is clearly due to a lack of familiarity with all of it’s badness. AD can cause a boatload of problems for administrators of Windows networks, as I have experienced first hand on numerous occasions.

This post is not to stop people from inventing things that solve their problems, it’s more of a open ended question about where the future lies for datacenter automation and getting us beyond the way we do things now, and to ask why there is so much diversity in the systems management space when all apps, proprietary and not, are essentially doing the same thing they have always done.

What we really needed at work was something like eDirectory, but we ended up using OpenLdap and pam_access on each server to manage permissions. For which we had to write lot’s of glue to manage it centrally etc..

I think there are several reasons we keep reinventing things:
- We’re sysadmins, not programmers with a CS degree
- No time to write lot’s of software, because we’re constantly disturbed by operational issues. So that’s why we have to pick existing tools and glue them together, fast.
- And of course, the existing commercial system management systems don’t actually do anything for you. You can install Tivoli plus it’s agents, but you still have to write enormous amounts of scripts, find ways to version control them etc.

FuncWeb was intended to be what you seek, but we have found most folks really don’t want the UI for Func. No, there’s not really a good remote management many-to-many type solution for configuring services, mainly because modeling the various servers and all versions of them is a huge challenge — that’s why Webmin is a mess (look at it’s Apache config, for instance). This is why tools like config management systems work at the level of the config file rather than modelling the application itself.

We believe it’s better to use a config management system for app config sort of things and then use Func for assorted tasks that don’t fit into that model (like restarting machines, running commands, misc scripting, or diagnostics).

So, thanks for cobbler, maybe I’ll get off of my duff and just make a Fedora Home Server spin myself… I know webmin isn’t the end-all solution for remote management, but I don’t even have square wheels to re-invent. Is there a good gui-based remote managment tool packaged with Fedora?

I just kept thinking about things like Moore’s law, where my flying car was, and why software for managing things is still fundamentally the same despite lots of improvement in hardware and a lot more proliferation of servers. Perhaps there is no point or immediate solution here. Random thoughts

Now I have a set of small shell scripts on each server, to do very specific tasks and I call them via a web interface. I probably reinvented the wheel but at least I know what it’s doing and it fits my needs.

It would be nice if services found each other magically started working together and built their own and…

I also want a pony. Actually I don’t want a pony.

A llama, maybe. If it was robotic. Lower maintenance that way.

Just need to find the steps to start getting us there.