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Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

> Blame the folks demonizing/shaming having "pet" servers and pushing immutable infrastructure. Linux server administration is quite enjoyable, and with how well apps these days can scale vertically, it really takes a special kind of workload to need (and actually saturate) fleets of servers.

You don't need pet servers. Puppet or Ansible make your baremetal cattle.

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I think most folks would argue "cattle" means using imaging to manage/replace your fleet. Using something like puppet or ansible against a fresh install implies a level of individualism towards each system as they "may" have minute details based on when puppet/ansible ran, even if they're part of a dynamic inventory of some sort.

I'm not following, sorry.

This is cattle:

* PXE boot server(s)

* Image contains masterless puppet bootstrap.

* Server(s) asks git - "give me the bootstrap for my mac address"

* Server(s) gets a list of classes to apply.

* Server(s) applies classes.

Done.

What kind of software do you use to configure PXE servers? Or is there anything else that I'm missing?

I'm looking for a solution to make unattend installation possible.

Edit: Can use Ansible to make a PXE server. (Egg or chicken thing)

There's a single pxeboot server that bootstraps everything. It sends back a single image common among all baremetal servers regardless of what asks for it. The actual configuration is done via a git repo that contains a mapping between mac address of a server and puppet classes.

I disagree. The 'cattle' vs 'pet' distinction is about replicability and replaceability. If you can spin up a new baremetal server quickly and easily in the configuration you need, then you're doing it right. The technology you choose is not relevant.

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