

New venture of Slicehost founder - DanielRibeiro
http://devstructure.com/

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jrnkntl
Wow, this is really cool. Sometimes I just keep tweaking a server losing track
of what I changed where (that's just me), would be so easy to just convert all
the configurations I did automatically into a puppet script and deploy it on a
bare-bones machine! So, how would they go about monetizing this thing?

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howradical
Hey I'm Matt. Honest answer at this point - we don't know, hence the open-
sourcing. I think our initial attempt last year was not explained well and too
difficult to get started with. This is our attempt to simplify our initial
work as much as possible. Blueprint figures out what you did to a server and
sandbox uses chroot magic to give you an isolated container to work in.

Our current direction which should be open for testing in April is a hosted
Puppet service. We're hoping to make it easier for people to get started w/ a
devops backend (Puppet, Nagios, etc).

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions I'm all ears matt AT
devstructure dot com

~~~
DanielRibeiro
I must say it was quite impressive and cool to see my personal's desktop
configuration automatically put into a ruby DSL.

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bkudria
Protip:

1\. Use a not-100%-polished website design that inspires trust, or

2\. Ask your visitor to execute random shell code from the internet, or

3\. Place a non-trivial redirect in that code that makes it impossible to
examine what exactly is being run on your system.

But, please, for the sake of all that is holy, do _not_ do all three at once.

(Yes, I know there is a "Source Code" link, but that's not directly what's
getting run, is it?)

~~~
rcrowley
Richard from DevStructure here. You're right about a lot of your criticism:
the setup.sh process is not ideal. I do think it is preferable to pointing
someone at packages.devstructure.com and saying, "Good luck!"

We'll be changing shortly to recommend `git clone` for first-time tinkerers
and packages.devstructure.com for real use.

~~~
howradical
Changed to git clone.

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arkitaip
We are actually going to migrate from one dedicated to another and documenting
all the software, libraries, settings, and data has been a pain. Would love to
try this but we don't run Ubuntu 10.04!

Side note: I am surprised that there is no floss migration tool that does
this. I know that it would be a complex piece of software but I would actually
pay/donate money for it.

~~~
howradical
We've had early talks with a few contributors about what it would take to
handle Redhat/CentOs based distros if that helps?

~~~
arkitaip
Actually, we're stuck on ubuntu 9.04 - but maybe that also works?

~~~
howradical
Yeah definitely worth a shot, I don't think you'd have any problems. If so it
would be minor stuff we can fix quickly.

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rkischuk
This is pretty killer. We use Chef, and although its repeatable results are
nice, coding for chef and deploying via knife seems tougher than it needs to
be.

This seems to have serious potential to position chef as a way of
communicating configuration while requiring very little direct writing of code
for Chef.

~~~
howradical
Definitely. We want people sharing their configs more, just like code.
Secondly, we feel that for most people, configuring via the command-line is
more natural, or at the very least an easier way to get started w/ puppet or
chef.

~~~
rkischuk
Exactly this. Getting a config running is quite often an iterative and
exploratory process that should not be enshrined in structure until it's
actually running. You get this, which is why Blueprint makes sense.

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robflynn
Thank you for reminding me of this. I gave it a try a while back and thought
it looked promising.

I recall having a couple of very small gripes with it (they really were quite
minor and were likely due to my own misunderstanding), but I honestly can't
even remember what those gripes were anymore.

I'm going to give it another shot.

~~~
robflynn
Can't seem to edit my post but I remembered what my issue was. I was having
trouble, at the time, getting it to work properly with RVM. I don't know if it
was something I did wrong or if it was an actual issue. I will investigate
tomorrow when I get back to work on the project.

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revorad
I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop and would love to use this to clone my
setup. Is there a workaround or do I have to upgrade to 10 before trying? I've
been putting off upgrading because I'm scared it will break something or the
other as upgrades always do.

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nphase
I am seriously excited about using this. I've been holding off on configuring
new forward deployed servers before automation is in place, this lets me get
work done now without worrying about shooting myself in the foot later.

~~~
howradical
Awesome to hear, let us know if we can assist with anything -
support@devstructure.com.

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X-Istence
I'd love to see something like this for FreeBSD (where a lot of the
configuration stuff is already centralised to begin with), as it would make my
life that much simpler!

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fourspace
Blueprint is also the name of a grid framework for HTML/CSS.

<http://www.blueprintcss.org/>

~~~
JoachimSchipper
And the name of a hundred other things, including technical drawings. I don't
think that CSS framework has a monopoly.

~~~
fourspace
Which is why it's often not a good name for a project.

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ceejayoz
Looks neat, I'll definitely be giving this a try.

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flexterra
Wow, just did a quick test and it looks very promising.

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bluethunder
Debian ?

