by Luke Kanies blogs a [rant|http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2007/02/why_isnt_system_administration.html] on configuration management that claims that the entire state of system administration is broken. Maybe he’s right, maybe he’s wrong. The problem is, he describes a microcosm of system administration in configuration management and then goes on to conclude that all tools of all aspects of system administration suck and that the field is stuck in the stone ages. It’s quite a logical leap. It would be like me complaining that all tools in all of medicine stuck because dentists still use pliers and knives to pull teeth. How large a percentage of your day to day sysadmin work is spent doing configuration management that would benefit from tools like lscfg, bcfg2, puppet, cfengine, or radmind? For me, it’s less than 1% of my daily work.
It’s a broad field. If one is going to make sweeping generalizations of the state of suckiness, I would expect better, deeper, exposition backed with evidence or sound deductive reasoning. Most complaints on his exposition go towards those ends, not towards the puppet tool or any of its relative merits in comparison to the rest of the field (which appear to be largely subjective).
See the whole thread [here|http://lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2007-February/001933.html]
Tom Limoncelli and jonesy have followups [here|http://lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2007-February/001933.html]