This post is part of a blog series which tries to simplify the adoption of configuration management frameworks.

As mentioned in the last post, software dependencies can be a blocker for the adoption of configuration management frameworks. In complex or legacy environments where one has several different and antique operating systems versions, even the installation of this frameworks can be painful. Easily too painful for a time saving tool.

About a year ago, I was trying to install the Puppet agent on Solaris 10, Solaris 11 and RHEL 5.x. And it took longer than 5 minutes …
Basically the most install tutorials require to have a current operating system and/or a connection to the Internet from your target systems. These requirements were just not realistic for my target servers at my work place.

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Frameworks like Puppet, Chef, Cfengine, or Salt are now available for some years. Their community is huge and „Automation“ seems to be the answer to almost everything in IT.

Many say: If you do system administration for more than one server and you don’t use a configuration management framework, you do it wrong!
I fully agree with this statement. But according my observation, everybody seems to be interested in using such frameworks, however in reality the adoption rate is quite low.

Why is this?

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As mentioned in the previous post I am working on a tool which collects essential information of Linux and Solaris systems. The first release is finally public available on GitHub (collect_sysinfo.py).

Why have I written this tool? I needed it for my job and I found no other tool, which fulfilled our requirements. Additionally it was a nice opportunity to train my Python and RegEx skills.

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