Linux Server Configuration tools

[johnfl68]

Hello:

Not FQ related, but there are a bunch of good people here.

Is there a middle of the road tool, something more than a bash script, but not as complex as Puppet, to set up and configure a server?

For example I have a few instances of Ubuntu 14.04 Server.
After the initial install, I create a new user, load ssh key for that user, disable root login, add ufw, fail2ban, logwatch, add about a dozen apt-get installs for perl, apache2, setup some file folders, copy some scripts over, etc.

The build is pretty much identical every time I do this. I don't do it often, but it would be nice if there was a better way other then going down a list in the document I have with notes of what all to do.

I had to add a new VPS server instance over the weekend in a rush, because the data center I use in Atlanta was heavily hit with DDoS attacks, and I needed to move a large amount of traffic over to another provider. It would have been nice if I had something to automate the process, or at least as much of it as possible.

I see I can script much of this in bash, but I was wondering if maybe there is something a little better.

I normally work on Windows machines, and use Putty and WinSCP for most of my server work. I doubt there is a Windows option to configure Linux boxes.

If there is something better that is open source, that would be great.

I don't know if there is anything worthwhile out there, or if writing up a bash script is probably the best route for my needs right now. I am trying to keep things somewhat scalable.

Maybe someone here knows of some options that I haven't seen yet in looking around. Otherwise I am still looking around, and at the least will start working on a Bash option for as much as it can do.

Thank you for your time!

John

[Terra]

We still use Puppet in places, however I've been leaning more towards using SaltStack to drive our infrastructure devops... It would seem that Ansible is coming up quickly as well, and at this point we haven't made a decision yet on which way we want to go... With Red Hat buying Ansible, it looks like it may become the defacto standard in the Docker/rkt world...

Give both of them a look and see if they can supplant your current Puppet operations... For us, it is just too early to tell which is the best path, so we are sticking with a system which is working well enough...

[Kevin]

When it comes to duplicating systems I prefer to just clone an existing system. I usually do so by restoring an existing system from backups then renaming it. This also has the advantage of meaning that I am well practiced with restoring servers from backups.

BTW, you might find MobaXterm (the free version) to be a lot better than putty plus it will auto-import your existing putty setup when you first start it.