We decided to go with Chef for Config management rather than Puppet. Feels pretty much the same to me, syntax is a little different and things are a little less structured but it is pretty much the same animal, just with little differences.

I am doing a lot more coding though, putting together hacks to get things working the way that they should and trying to integrate some simple little commands into an existing environment can be tricky.

Formatting can be especially so within the Ruby code of Chef recipes/templates. I spent literally hours trying to figure out how to get certain attributes formatted correctly into a template before I finally just pretty much gave up doing it in an elegant way and hacked it together using simple text substitution. I don’t think anyone is going to look at my stuff and be impressed by my ingenuity.

Still, getting things done is pretty much the name of the sysadmin game, otherwise I would have been a software developer. And, at the end of the day, it works and does what I need it to do which is pretty much all I need.