

Show HN: Synapse - Universal API for remote system administration - raphdg
http://comodit.github.com/synapse-agent/

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dsr_

       You don't have to know about yum, apt or whatever package manager your hosts use thanks to synapse-agent's abstraction layer.
    

Except, of course, that a sysadmin who doesn't know this is not a sysadmin.
And someone who tries installing the same package across different operating
systems is going to be in for a shock when it turns out that they have the
same name for different versions, or different names for the same version, or
completely different ways of configuring it.

This looks neat, but I don't see anything that says they have learned lessons
from puppet, bcfg2 and cfengine.

~~~
eschnou
Indeed, the package example is the easiest one to explain but the least useful
due to naming issues accross distro. It works however the same for services,
users, etc.

As you mention, the approach is really similar to the abstraction in the
Puppet DSL. But instead of using it to describe a recipe, you use it to
remotely manage a host.

Obviously you need knowledge of the target system, but at least you can write
orchestration scripts that are cross-platform and where the only data changing
are package names, path, and content of files.

~~~
dsr_
Ok, so what did you folks learn from the other projects in this space? Why is
this better than Puppet, bcfg2, or cssh?

~~~
eschnou
Synapse is not a puppet/chef like configuration management tool, it is used
for live management & orchestration.

It's in fact much more similar to mcollective and salt, which both innovates
from tools like cssh by using a messaging middleware instead of ssh to connect
to the target hosts.

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akoumjian
I am looking forward to reading more about this. For a slightly different
approach (Python + 0MQ) with a very active community, please check out
<http://saltstack.org/>

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eslachance
There's no mention of it on the video or the page, but it seems safe to
presume that there's no support for Windows-based servers? Or am I just
missing it?

~~~
raphdg
The Windows support is coming soon, it's in the features pipe-line.

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bashtoni
What makes this better than mcollective?

The examples make it look very similar, but written in python.

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evanprodromou
Wow, this looks pretty cool.

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jahewson
Why not use Puppet or Chef?

~~~
raphdg
See this comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4499900>

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jeanpierrelevac
Definitively interesting!

