[p2pu-dev] [p2pu-community] Introducing Marvin

John Britton john at p2pu.org
Tue Jun 18 22:37:42 UTC 2013


@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.

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On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Timothy Gaudette <tgaudette88 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Very cool. I particularly like the inspiration for the name.
>
> -Tim on the Go
> On Jun 18, 2013 12:39 PM, "Dirk Uys" <dirk at p2pu.org> wrote:
>
>> Posted at http://info.p2pu.org/2013/06/18/introducing-marvin/
>>
>> [image: Image CC-BY-SA John Greenaway]<http://info.p2pu.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/3356358479_a0e3ee8a05_b.jpg>
>>
>> Image CC-BY-SA John Greenaway<http://www.flickr.com/photos/johngreenaway/>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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!
>>
>> 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!
>>
>> We named our robotic cook Marvin, after Marvin the Paranoid Android<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_the_Paranoid_Android>from the “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. Almost everything that is
>> needed to get P2PU up and running can be found in this github repository<https://github.com/p2pu/marvin/>
>> .
>>
>> You may stop reading at this point if you wish to skip the technical
>> details and incomprehensible abbreviations [image: :)]
>>
>> We chose to use Ansible <http://www.ansibleworks.com/> 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.
>>
>> The Marvin repository contains the playbooks to setup lernanta<https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta>running at
>> p2pu.org, badges <https://github.com/p2pu/badges> running at
>> badges.p2pu.org and Etherpad Lite<https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite>running at
>> pad.p2pu.org.
>>
>> 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 repository<https://github.com/p2pu/marvin/>for more instructions.
>>
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