garethr

Actually I think active is probably the wrong word, so changed in the post, but to answer your question:

It's a system based on multiple web services and run across multiple hosts, and I've included all system checks in that number. So we have checks for:

* ping, ssh, disk, load, network io, etc. * error rates from request logs * request rates (warning on high values) * smoke tests for key functionality (i.e. does the search engine return results, can you complete certain forms, etc.) * connection tests from relevant hosts to relevant services or databases

Both Chef and Puppet have made big strides with Windows support recently and people are using them in anger. Might be worth reading the following:

http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/05/24/chef-hearts-windows/ http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Puppet_Window...

It's not. But that doesn't make either of them right. I called Flickr on this 3 years ago before anyone actually visited my blog: http://morethanseven.net/2008/02/21/sorry-but-the-flickr-api...

I'll give it a good few weeks, say a month, and then get the results together. It depends on how popular it is, if I'm still seeing results come in and how much time I can grab.

I'll post them to my blog (http://morethanseven.net) and I'll post the link on here too.

I'll definitely publish the results, including the raw data.

Thanks. I'd kept off all identifying information as some folks prefer to keep operational information secret. I'm hoping the complete anonymity gets me more filled out questionnaires.

I'll give it a good few weeks, say a month, and then get the results together. I'll post them to my blog (http://morethanseven.net) and I'll post the link on here too.

RVM is great. But by design it's a solution to compiling software on every machine. This simply doesn't work for lots of sysadmins, especially with lots of machines - it means installing a complete build environment which opens up much more evil.

Checkinstall is brilliant: http://checkinstall.izto.org/

It's also guilty of being unattractive to the developers I'd love to see use it. The site says "Recent News: Dec 26th, 2009" and then concentrates on a NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS.

Showing the hello world of checkinstall would be much better imho, and it's what developers from the web world expect.

That wasn't my aim. In fact I'm not using Debian at the moment as I indicated, I just know the commands better to give examples. This isn't about a specific distro, it's about the huge benefits of system packages and their toolchains in general. I'm not even really concerned with official packages and the official blessed package repos.

To my knowledge no. I think this is one of the main problems in getting people to create system packages. I think this fosters the split between package maintainers and developers. It's not that the documentation is all bad, it's just not aimed at the audience I think it should be.

System packages just aren't what web savvy developers grew up on and the documentation feels out of step. But the capabilities and tools around system packages are awesome.

I might take a go a writing a simple guide, but I'd be more than happy to see other people have a go that know more than I do. Let me know if this sounds of interest.