chef, puppet and AIX support?

[cncook001]

I am ready to jump into either Chef or Puppet.  Primary interest is for linux (which seems to have great coverage).

We also need to support AIX and windows.  Also looks like both handle Windows well.

How well is AIX "supported" by both?

Interested in the open source versions if that matters.

By "supported" I mean things like able to deploy packages, do updates, etc.

The Chef or Puppet master servers would live on Red Hat.

I saw this quote on the puppet wiki "partially unsupported but yet still useful"


Thanks

Craig

[AJ Christensen]

Yo,

Sorry for top post;

I have definitely seen a few AIX providers merged for Chef, although I
cannot attest to overall platform support. I would wager the man to
contact would be Doug MacEachern, referenced here:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-1767

I no longer use puppet but do recall perhaps more overall platform
support for AIX. Anyone?

Cheers,

--AJ

[James Turnbull]

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AJ Christensen wrote:
> Yo, I no longer use puppet but do recall perhaps more overall

> platform support for AIX. Anyone?
>

We have pretty strong AIX support (services, packages, cron, files, etc,
etc) but the bar isn't set overly high and it varies somewhat between
AIX OS releases. We have several large customers who use it but we don't
ship packages (you have to roll your own) for it natively. But there is
a small but active community who hack and patch the supported types
though so I suspect you'd get help on the user list if you had specific
queries.

Regards

James Turnbull

- --
Author of:
* Pro Puppet (http://tinyurl.com/ppuppet)
* Pro Linux System Administration (http://tinyurl.com/linuxadmin)
* Pro Nagios 2.0 (http://tinyurl.com/pronagios)
* Hardening Linux (http://tinyurl.com/hardeninglinux)

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[Héctor Rivas Gándara]

On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 9:02 PM, cncook001 <cnco...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am ready to jump into either Chef or Puppet.  Primary interest is for
> linux (which seems to have great coverage).

> We also need to support AIX and windows.  Also looks like both handle
> Windows well.

> How well is AIX "supported" by both?

I did use puppet on AIX time ago (~1.5 years) in a previous position.
We were managing our basic OS configuration with it, and I was quite
happy.

Some types for puppet for the basic stuff were implemented, and I
think that now is in the master branch. But since then I did not
contribute any more because I do not have an AIX (nor time) to play :(
. Now that I know more ruby probably I would do better job, though :)

Currently I am working more with chef rather than puppet, I would say
that chef is more convenient (It is more imperative), but you can make
it work in both of them.

So far I can tell you:

1. AIX has a wonderful set of command line commands for all the
management, VERY consistent and robust (mk*, ch*, ls*, rm*). It is
very easy to implement all the management stuff in puppet or chef,
even without implementing types or resources, just with "execs",
definitions and lightweight resources.

Also most of the configuration files have a very similar format,
so is easy to implement a helper to use them.

I think that the AIX management philosophy fits perfectly with
puppet/chef (actually NIM is some kind of CM system). Even it would be
"easy" to implement recipes to manage the VIOS and the HMC.

2. The main problem that you have in AIX is the lack of community
and, because this, lack of support for opensource packages. For
instance it was difficult make ruby itself run (I hope now it is ok).

A lot of times you need to rely on different pre-compiled
providers or compile your own software, and not always you can package
them (lack of time, knowledge, problems compiling). Some packages are
native, other are RPMS, other plain .tgz... I was using a lot the gnu
stow[1] software to deploy the software.

Last year, for the same problem on Solaris, I used a lot the Gentoo
Prefix distribution [2], that works great, really. It simplifies all
the package management and provides almost for free thousands of
opensource packages. You can also create a repository with precompiled
binary packages, making you even much more happy :)

I do not know how it works on AIX, but I think it is worth it.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/

--
Héctor Rivas

[Michael Stahnke]

There's a decent write-up here that may help get started with Puppet on AIX.

http://t3chnick.blogspot.com/2012/01/32-bit-puppet-rpms-srpms-for-aix-howto.html

I also wrote up how to get ruby going from the last time I had to do it.

http://stahnma.fedorapeople.org/aix/