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Comment by StanAngeloff | Hacker News Reader

I used to bootstrap a lot of VMs in development using shell scripts [1]. At a certain point Bash scripts become unmanageable. Ansible, Chef, Puppet have stricter syntax, battle-tested modules, large communities, proper multi-OS support, etc. Investing time to learn any of those tools certainly pays off in the long run.

Bash is great for a quick setup or a one-off instance. However it requires discipline for anything more. You are also dealing with the underlying OS yourself (e.g., Nginx is packaged and configured differently in Ubuntu, Debian, Cent OS & Arch; networking is configured differently in Ubuntu depending on whether systemd is installed, etc.).

[1] https://github.com/StanAngeloff/vagrant-shell-scripts

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so it is the scripting language used by ansible, chef, puppet that imposes the required "discipline"?

methinks each of these must in fact call the shell to get things done or least system(3).

if they are calling execve then i would be more interested.

i would also be interested in ansible, chef, puppet if i knew the scripting languages they are written in or wanted to learn them. but other languages interest me more.

as a hobbyist, what i would like to see is a hosting provider that will boot fs images (including bootloader) that user builds on users own computer. i.e., provider gives exact specs of machine and network details. user builds and sends fs image to provider and provider boots from it on some bare metal in a datacenter.

no "host" or "guest". no virtual server. no provider software. if something software-related does not work, it is user's responsibility because it is all user's software. user can send an updated fs image.

anyone know if this exists? the service wanted is barebones: a computer in a datacenter that has an internet connection and someone to boot it from user fs image. cost not an issue.

Used to do this working at a colo back in the 90s; boot the image then walk away. If someone borked their machine they'd email or call and we'd roll the power for them.

> as a hobbyist, what i would like to see is a hosting provider that will boot fs images (including bootloader) that user builds on users own computer. i.e., provider gives exact specs of machine and network details. user builds and sends fs image to provider and provider boots from it on some bare metal in a datacenter.

This is actually somewhat possible with linode. It's not easy to do but it's possible.

https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/disk-images/migrating-a...

Ansible, Chef and Puppet are not languages. They are systems for managing the state of your server, during the whole lifetime of the server. You typically tell them "I want X to be in Y state" and they will take whatever actions to make that happen. Writing all that logic in a shell script is not particularly trivial. Of course, it's not all perfect and sometimes you have to resort to scripting-like approach, but the idea is that for the common patterns, they already have the logic implemented.

> You typically tell them "I want X to be in Y state" and they will take whatever actions to make that happen.

I had so many problems with this, because not all possibilities are tested on all distributions on all architectures with all libc's and compiler combinations. Much is implicit compared to Nix where only the kernel is implicit.

Why would you be running on dozens of distros on different architectures?

With some sane level of standardization (lets say less than 6 combinations) it's easy enough to test all and fix up the discrepencies.

The more declaritive you are, and the less you assume about the environment, the better this will work.

Ie. if you need a package, always install it. On some distros it may be there by default, but you'll run into issues if it's not. The good thing about being declaritive is that there's no harm in checking.

> no "host" or "guest". no virtual server

Much of the time, virtualization is just a way to give you control over the whole machine. If virtualization is thin, you don't lose a lot of performance.

It shouldn't be hard to make a Xen-backed VM administration interface. Then you can upload your MirageOS images (that you have tested on your local Linux, because MirageOS does that too) and it would work.

You can't get rid of virtualization and still have it remotely configurable. How are you going to reset configuration of a machine if you destroyed the bootloader of the ring-0 operating system?

do not want to have it remotely configurable. nor want anyone to be able to "reset configuration" remotely.

some configuration is fixed, static. to change it one needs to change the image. this is intentional. hobbyist user wants this.

bootloader is on removable media user sends to provider. user is not using any provider software. user is paying for dedicated server and internet connection. that is all.

do not use linux, mirageos. do not need to. have rump. user can make own xen guest kernels and xen host kernels. anyway, this is tangent, irrelevant. user does not need virtualization necessarily and in any case not virtualization provided by third party.

simple requirements: want dedicated bare metal server. want hardware and internet connection. do not need/want provider software. will pay more for this.

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