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Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#191

Post by vacri »

dozzie wrote: post #71
tchaffee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I evaluated Puppet, Chef, and Ansible and Ansible was by far the easiest for me to learn. My favorite thing I use it for is my personal laptop setup. I can go from clean Ubuntu install to having all the software I use along with system settings all perfect within an hour, without me being involved.

It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. You haven't learned anything beside new punctuation and keywords. Ansible is basically a glorified shell script executed semi-interactively through SSH. It doesn't exhibit a new paradigm in server management by any stretch. CFEngine, on the other hand, shows a whole another way to approach managing systems, and thus it's qui…

I started with Puppet and moved to Ansible. Ansible is much easier to debug, because everything happens in sequence and it doesn't freak out and break if you have the same identical command in two modules. Puppet builds this rats-nest dependency graph before it runs, and that's a pain in the arse to debug. Ansible's limitation is 'ssh bandwidth' - something like Puppet seems to me better for more heavyweight environments where you have three figures or more of servercount.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#193

Post by vacri »

dozzie wrote: post #115
tchaffee wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn? I needed something that was very quick to learn and I had most of my setup automated in Ansible before I had even finished trying to learn the other options. Ansible won hands down o…

>> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn. > It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn? On its own it's not a wrong thing, but as I said, you didn't learn anything substantially different, so you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale. You only added shell scr…

> you still haven't seen a proper configuration management system.

No true Scotsman...

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#194

Post by sumedh »

dmak wrote: post #75
SirLJ wrote: post #49

Stock market trading systems, so I don't have to watch screens, also backups and also constantly improving monitoring for smooth operations

How can I get started with this? Did you create machine learning algorithms too?

Google "Trend Following Systems". The simple systems follow the moving average and triggers a call if the share price goes up or down the average value.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#195

Post by vacri »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #155
steven_braham wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jep, love that chart. Recently showed it to a colleague when we were discussing if it's was worth it to automate our domain creating processes.

Every time I look at that chart, my eyes glaze over and I decide not to automate. The title text when alludes to this. I just ... don't get it. I fear I may be a bear of small brain. As someone else mentioned, there are other valuable considerations the chart ignores, such as likelihood and impact of mistakes.

Automation also gets rid of context-switching, which has a cost of its own. It may only take you half an hour to do -foo-, but to switch into the mental space for it and switch out again are costs that most people don't factor in.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#197

Post by joshschreuder »

anotherevan wrote: post #189

Wrote a program that tracks Australian movie release dates for movies I'm interested in. Sends a daily email if a release date moves, or there a new movies for me to flag my interest in. Interfaces with themoviedb.org for plot summary, cast and crew info and such. Interfaces with Google Calendar for writing entries for each movie I'm tracking.

Would you be able to share or open source? I would be interested in something like this and have friends that would also.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#198

Post by copperx »

dozzie wrote: post #134
tchaffee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had spent the time to learn a "proper" configuration management system, it would have been a loss. I had a very limited amount of time to make it worth automating what amounts to a few hours of manual work. > you didn't learn anything substantially different So what? Learning something substantially different wasn't one of my requirements. My goal was to automate a few simple deployments, including my personal l…

>> You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt > You've said this enough that I'll push back. That's definitely wrong. [...] For one, [Ansible] checks the current state of the system it is configuring to determine whether or not software needs to be installed. So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic that is not possible to be called from shell? Because I could do pret…

Ok, I'll bite: If shell scripts, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet all suck, according to you, what solution would a competent Sysadmin use?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#199

Post by xcubic »

In Lausanne, Switzerland, it's very difficult to find an appartement because there are too few appartements for too many people and it mostly follows "First-come, first-served".

So I created scrappers for 3 websites + 1 facebook group. It simply looks for apartments with my specifications and notify me when a new one comes up.

I can say, I successfully found an apartment. The whole process usually takes at least 3 months, I did it in 1.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks do you automate?

#200

Post by fma »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #88

In 2003 I had a perl script to query the job boards for keywords , scrap the result and send out an application email with CV attached to it (I took care to send one application to a single email). I think this was a legitimate form of spamming - at that moment the local job market was very bad.

Funny. I think Amazon does that on LinkedIn when trying to find applicants :)

Except they don't take care to send one email per person.

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