68
Using Gnu+Linux at work
(lemmy.world)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
In terms of ease of management and deployment NixOS might be an interesting option. It can be completely configured through a single file so the deployment and update processes become very straightforward and easy to manage in a centralised fashion.
I was thinking about that myself, but is there a way to remotely update configuration.nix and rebuild, if the requirements change? For example, if some dev wants to use Geany instead of Vscode and Admin is like "Yeah, why not", how would that be implemented?
Ssh or ansible lol
Sure. Pick any orchestration solution you like. Ansible, for example. You'd just change the file that is rolled out for that machine, either by changing some central, per-machine file or its ansible file, then tell ansible to update the file remotely and make it run
nixos-rebuild switch
on that machine. A few seconds later the tool is installed. If you replaced vscode with geany vscode would be uninstalled, too.I would consider a git repo of a few standard configurations and switch them to a config that had it, or possibly maintain individual configs per user. Your orchestration would need to reference the git repo so when you need to add software XYZ to everyone’s machine you don’t have to re-run all of the individual playbooks and deal with the hassle of remembering who needed which playbook ran.
IIRC you can apply a confog built locally on a remote host, of you have SSH keys set up