I personally know of no other company that has such an initiative (would be awesome to see MS do the same though, but somehow I'm not entirely hopeful that we'll see that day).
A disgruntled mail admin.
-Ben
You mean just like Windows 7? <grin>
-Ben
We're using v2 also, but a friend and I were recently discussing v3 and he pointed me at http://www.cfengine.org/downloads/cf3-reference.html#Upgrading-from-cfengine-2, which seems to indicate that there is decent support to transition between the two versions, thus doing incremental changeover.
I haven't looked further into it, but on the surface, it looks like a good option.
-Ben
While I _mostly_ agree with this, a nice policy management (configuration management mostly) tool is also essential when dealing with lots of boxes. You want a new setting for all Gnome desktops, simply add it to the policy tool and let it distributed any required config files or run commands to change the setting, etc. This type of thing used to be done with things like: for h in $all_my_hosts; do ssh $h
CFEngine and Puppet and friends are a nicer way of doing this. They're "self documenting" in that your write the code and then you can later very easily see when you added some configuration bits, etc...version control your configuration management scripts and you get even better tracking of who did what and when. (A side question: How does one do the version control type stuff in AD?)
While kickstart is great (I use it), it only goes so far. Having a policy manager on top of that (installed and configured in the kickstart) is a beautiful thing!
-Ben
I was going to say CFEngine, but that's only because it's what I'm currently using. I'd love to move to puppet but at the time we deployed CFEngine, puppet wasn't ready for all the things we needed it to do (windows and solaris in addition to linux)...this has likely changed now, but we've got a lot of cf scripts that would need conversion.
Whichever tool is chosen (there are others in this space too), I believe this is the correct answer. I know that CFEngine scares a lot of people off (and maybe puppet does too?), but it is an excellent way to manage a large set of hosts.
-Ben
middle school kids. They don't have to grok it, they just have to have the chance to be inspired by it. Also...if the principal ran into you in
Although, I thinking grokking is an important part, you're exactly right. Inspiration is sorely lacking for most kids in a north american education system (I won't speak for other parts of the world here). Only a few lucky ones have something grab their imaginations in such a way that they're turned on to self learning, etc. If only 'inspiring others' was something easily taught and passed on...
-Ben
If all else fails, lower your standards.
