<div dir="ltr">@Jessy - Chef & Puppet are targeted more towards managing a fleet of servers, with many boxes in each of a number of different roles. Ansible is simpler and is targeted to single machines or at least to much smaller numbers.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div>--<div>contact info:<br><a href="http://www.johndbritton.com/" target="_blank">http://www.johndbritton.com</a><br>@johndbritton - <a href="http://twitter.com/johndbritton" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/johndbritton</a></div>
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<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Timothy Gaudette <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tgaudette88@gmail.com" target="_blank">tgaudette88@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<p>Very cool. I particularly like the inspiration for the name.</p>
<p>-Tim on the Go</p><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">
<div class="gmail_quote">On Jun 18, 2013 12:39 PM, "Dirk Uys" <<a href="mailto:dirk@p2pu.org" target="_blank">dirk@p2pu.org</a>> wrote:<br type="attribution"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Posted at <a href="http://info.p2pu.org/2013/06/18/introducing-marvin/" target="_blank">http://info.p2pu.org/2013/06/18/introducing-marvin/</a><br><br>
<div style="width:553px"><a href="http://info.p2pu.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/3356358479_a0e3ee8a05_b.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Image CC-BY-SA John Greenaway" height="362" width="543"></a><p>
Image CC-BY-SA <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/" target="_blank">John Greenaway</a></p></div>
<p>At the start of the year we spent some time on behind the scenes
work. We had a long overdue software upgrade that we needed to perform
on our main server. At the same time we took the opportunity to improve
how we maintain the systems to run the tools we use for P2PU.</p>
<p>Maintaining a server requires a lot of work. Someone needs to know
what software is required, then install and update the software in
questions, edit configuration files, remember what services to stop and
start again, pick good passwords and remember them, etc!</p>
<p>Instead of having someone slaving away at a command line and trying
remember what to do each time, we decided to automate the process. It is
almost like writing down a recipe and handing it to a robotic cook with
all the ingredients!</p>
<p>We named our robotic cook Marvin, after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android" target="_blank">Marvin the Paranoid Android</a> from the “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. Almost everything that is needed to get P2PU up and running can be found in <a href="https://github.com/p2pu/marvin/" target="_blank">this github repository</a>.</p>
<p>You may stop reading at this point if you wish to skip the technical details and incomprehensible abbreviations <img alt=":)"> </p>
<p>We chose to use <a href="http://www.ansibleworks.com/" target="_blank">Ansible</a>
to implement Marvin. Ansible uses YAML configuration files called
playbooks to describe the tasks needed to setup and configure a server.
These tasks are then executed over SSH on the remote host. The advantage
of this is that it’s easy to bootstrap a system – you just need to know
what operating system you are targeting and setup SSH access.</p>
<p>The Marvin repository contains the playbooks to setup <a href="https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta" target="_blank">lernanta</a> running at <a href="http://p2pu.org" target="_blank">p2pu.org</a>, <a href="https://github.com/p2pu/badges" target="_blank">badges</a> running at <a href="http://badges.p2pu.org" target="_blank">badges.p2pu.org</a> and <a href="https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite" target="_blank">Etherpad Lite</a> running at <a href="http://pad.p2pu.org" target="_blank">pad.p2pu.org</a>.</p>
<p>There is still potential to improve and better organize these
playbooks. If you would like to give them a test drive, you can install
Ansible, setup a virtual machine and run the playbooks! See the <a href="https://github.com/p2pu/marvin/" target="_blank">repository</a> for more instructions.</p><br></div>
<p></p>
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