I'm not trying to bust your chops -- I think this is a great implementation that is geared for developers who might not have sysadmin experience -- I'm just saying that there seems to be a fair amount of risk opening up and running remote bash scripts based off of anything on the internet; chef and other system configuration tools require you to implicitly trust your sources, because they can change at any time. What happens if your system gets broken into? What happens when the service no longer exists? As I've mentioned, this would be a great service for developers who don't want to mess with managing their own test and development environments, but, I'd never push this to a production server.
But right now I'm not asking people to drop everything and use rayburst to set up their production servers no questions asked. Just to try it out and see if it does what they need.
If someone then decides to use it for production setup, we can talk about how to guarantee security and stability in the configuration for their setup. BTW this is why you enter into contracts, pay for services, etc.
It's possible to design the process to allow installs into other locations but that would require a fair bit of extra configuration (picking up the libraries, etc.) and testing. And you'd lose the service startups. It's something to think about if there's enough demand (and probably required for supporting Macs)
While I could describe what's going (and will right below), there's also the risk that what I'm saying doesn't match up with what's really going on. The best way to personally check what's going on is to set up a throwaway system and see if everything checks out. (You'll see that it does.)
So what is the process?
1. Install necessary os distribution packages to be able to build dependencies for the rayburst client 2. Download and build ruby from source 3. Install rayburst client (which includes chef) 4. Run the install for your server configuration 5. Report back success/failure of the install
You're able to see the install script that's downloaded via the wget command and as well as the recipes that are cached locally on your system (check the install output for the locations).
And the only way to be sure in the future that it remains this way is to have a trusted outside entity perform regular audits. It's a bit too early in the stage of this project for that. But it's one of the things I've thought about.