Show HN: Server installs simplified (and built from source)

by lnguyen • 14 years ago

79 57 14 years ago

ktosiek• 14 years ago

Looks nice for testing something, but I see no information about support (especially notifications about security patches).

EDIT: looking at their scripts, it's using a client written in Ruby with its own Ruby installation. Things are installed in {/usr/local/,/var/*/}rayburst.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

The client gets installed in /usr/local/rayburst and data for your install goes under /var/lib/rayburst. It's done so that it doesn't get in the way of any of your actual installs (had enough conflicts with system ruby when testing). And you can clear out those directories once everything is installed.

All in all the current design is to get things installed on a new server and then get out of your way.

robotmay• 14 years ago

I like the concept; I think simple server configuration is still an unsolved problem and it's good to see someone taking a stab at something new. I'll hopefully have a chance to try it out soon.

Quick note; set 'cursor: pointer;' in your CSS for the 3 main blocks. I didn't notice they were clickable until I started randomly clicking :)

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

Thanks. I'm more backend and ops than design and UI. So things like figuring out obscure compile flags comes easier than CSS.

plasma• 14 years ago

Great work, always wanted something like this.

Good for "dev ops" people like me who would rather focus on the app than server configuration (but still need to do it).

jefe782• 14 years ago

Maybe you shouldn't call yourself "dev ops" if you don't want to focus on this type of thing?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

"Dev Ops" isn't really something you choose to call yourself. You end up with that kind of title because it's what you end up doing.

jbverschoor• 14 years ago

indeed

aaronbrethorst3• 14 years ago

Very cool. Are you planning on adding support for the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release soon?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

As soon as I can get a VM loaded and run through the install catalog. I should be able to get that taken care of by the beginning of next week.

It's mostly to fix any build dependencies that have to be installed as distribution packages have name updates. There were a handful between 10.04 and 11.10.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

So far 12.04 LTS tests out without any need for updates (no build issues or service startup errors reported)

netmute2• 14 years ago

This literally sounds too good to be true.

I found no contact or company information on their website, except 2 email adresses. I can't verify if this is just a clever way of mass deploying a stealth botnet or something.

Will you trust them?

aaronbrethorst3• 14 years ago

It looks like it's a good UI on top of Opscode's Chef platform. You choose your Chef recipes and run a script that downloads the Chef client and starts installing recipes.

So, it doesn't seem to be too good to be true, at least to me. My guess is that this is an MVP for a product designed to put a non-awful UI on top of Chef (Opscode's SaaS product is, imho, borderline unusable).

That said, there is a high bar here for trust, no doubt about it.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

FYI the recipes are all custom written. The community ones are aren't very standardized and usually are only good for installing from distribution packages.

(And if you look through the install output, you'll also see where they get stored on your server if you want to review anything that's being done.)

fpp• 14 years ago

Guess letting someone 3rd party install your server / compile your server from source requires a bit more than trust. IMHO this will be the key problem for professional /paying users. Those who would just use e.g. an AMI from a repository will certainly have no problem with that.

If you find a way to generate install scripts that can be inspected before those are run or the service is providing the scripts to be run from a local Chef server that might be an interesting approach.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

It's true. And I'm not running a stealth botnet or anything.

I'm just better at building things than trying to write marketing collateral.

Feel free to email me directly at long at rayburst.com

netmute2• 14 years ago

No offense here, I think what you did is awesome. But _some_ information about who build the site would be nice, on the site.

imroot2• 14 years ago

Before I would deploy this, I'd have to really understand what you're doing with your chef recipies -- I would be concerned that your use of chef might throw my system into a unknown state -- specifically, what are you doing in chef? Are you adding SSH keys in your recipe (I'm not saying you are -- I'm just saying there's a severe lack of transparency as to what's going on behind the scenes, and that could put me at risk if I were managing that type of thing).

Other than that -- cool stuff.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

I definitely understand that there's a level of trust needed before you allow anyone get access to your system (or be it's provider). And it should be that way.

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.

imroot2• 14 years ago

If your target audience for this is the individuals who don't have the skills or time to really settle down and do the install by hand, do you honestly think that they have the time (or skills) to set up a throwaway system and then audit the changes that your log files say versus what really happened on their system?

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.

jtimberman• 14 years ago

What the generated rayburst.sh script does:

1. Writes out configuration for the chef client.

2. Generates a node on the chef server with the specified "run list" (recipes selected in the rayburst site).

3. Install Ruby and Chef RubyGem

4. Runs Chef with the node that was created on the chef server.

You can download and preview everything before it runs as root on your system.

For example, if you choose the normal stack, you get this run list:

recipe[nginx], recipe[passenger], recipe[postgresql::server], recipe[rails], recipe[ruby]

When you run this on a system, like a throwaway VM or EC2 instance, it will download the cookbooks required for this run list, which you can review what they're going to do after the synchronization step of Chef is complete. With rayburst, the cookbooks will be synchronized into /var/cache/rayburst.

rdl2• 14 years ago

This looks useful.

Why did you use chef vs. puppet? Personal familiarity, or was it better in some externally objective way?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

I spent a bit of time at the beginning of the project evaluating the two and ended up choosing chef because it was going to be easier to use this way (aka build something on top of).

I will say that it was easier and far less confusing to get puppet up and running initially. There's definitely a bit that needs to be worked out in the chef documentation. The "Ruby"-ness of chef wasn't really a deciding factor as I can work with just about anything as long as it's reasonable.

rdl2• 14 years ago

I am slightly ashamed to admit that I'm still more into cfengine than either, and then writing personal scripts to install ~everything.

stephenhandley• 14 years ago

would it be possible to display the resulting chef recipes from the chosen configuration on /server/:id ?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

I'm not inclined to exposing them directly as the recipes rayburst uses are custom and not open source or redistributable.

Jake2322• 14 years ago

Any possibility of supporting Linode? I haven't looked into it, but I'd imagine it's possible and Linode is a awesome provider.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

The main issue is whether or not ubuntu is offered.

It looks like Linode does offer ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04 so you should be able to use rayburst for your installs.

I'll add them to the list on the next site update.

Jake2322• 14 years ago

Yea, Linode support both. Thanks.

tszming2• 14 years ago

Why you need to compile Ruby from source in your bootstrap script?

https://rayburst.com/i/eaccdda22268af9633720f6d799d5004

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

I use chef as my behind-the-scenes mechanism for managing the installs. The client is a Ruby application so I build it as a runtime dependency.

I don't use rely on the distribution Ruby because of possible conflicts with gems that would have to get installed. The goal is to be able to get everything installed and then get out of the way.

tszming2• 14 years ago

I am curious because I usually use stock Ruby for Chef deployment, just want to know if you have any specific reason(s).

autoipad• 14 years ago

I like Centmin for PHP - bash scripts and standard RPMs:

www.btcentral.org.uk/projects/centmin/

Does Rayburst do anything different (apart from different programming languages)?

Is there any reason why Bash scripts can't deliver the same result as Rayburst?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

The centmin.sh script is designed specifically for that install: CentOS + Nginx, MySQL, PHP. If it works well for you and that's what you need, then definitely keep using it.

rayburst sets up a framework to allow for more customized installs. You can pick the various apps and services and the modularity of the build scripts/recipes handles the install of the configuration. Part of what takes place is figuring out the build dependencies (ex Rails depends on Ruby) which would otherwise have to be hardcoded in a bash script.

darklajid2• 14 years ago

I'm not entirely serious here..

But isn't this kind of running Gentoo on top of Ubuntu?

Having little experience with big deployments: Are people really preferring to build from source to have the latest and greatest? I noticed that I stopped wishing for that a long time ago, when management (and building!) of these packages just felt too much of a burden, compared to potentially slightly outdated binary packages.

nacs• 14 years ago

Gentoo = Compile a whole OS (hundreds of packages)

This = Compile a package (or 2 or 3) to get the latest

A lot of distros package an older version of the software this thing lets you deploy (node.js on Ubuntu for example is at 0.49 on 11.x) so I had to compile 0.6 manually (and yes I know there are PPAs).

I could definitely use this.

darklajid2• 14 years ago

I wasn't being totally serious, of course. And I could nitpick that Gentoo has binary packages - build from ebuilds (which I tried to compare to these chef receipts, with a grin).

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

It is a bit similar in concept to Gentoo but adds in a configuration management (CM) part. The current iteration doesn't take full advantage of the CM capabilities but we're working on it.

As far as building packages as compared to installed the distribution binaries... I've run into issues where the binary package wasn't compatible with libraries and apps that I had to install outside of apt-get or yum. For instance setting up reasonably modern Rails configuration with all the gems I needed on a Ubuntu 10.04 server.

I've also done builds and software configuration management for a living so the whole process is more like second nature at this point.

What you do want to avoid is a constant cycle of having to upgrade and build existing and working environments just to have the latest versions. At that point you do need to step back and evaluate if it's really necessary (security, fix, etc.).

michaelmior• 14 years ago

I'd rather run tested software that someone else has compiled then build it myself just to get a slightly newer version. Older versions are generally safer to run as well since by virtue of their age they've been more tested with more bugs removed and security holes plugged.

sweetass2• 14 years ago

How is this different from a script with apt-get or yum? I understand there are some, but not that significant benefit. Did I miss something?

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

With apt-get and yum you're installing pre-built binaries. This works well if that's all you need to do and are okay with the versions that are installed (typically not the latest unless it's a new distribution).

Once you start having to download and build source for apps/libraries that aren't pre-packaged you can run into issues about version compatibilities, where files are located, do you need to download additional packages (*-dev), etc. Having a service that takes care of this for you solves a lot of headaches (part of why rayburst got built in the first place).

sweetass2• 14 years ago

Then it sounds like gentoo emerge for other distro. It is useful for setup the software stack base, but I still have to log into the server to configure the software and deploy my code.

In my opinion, you either use PaaS or use chef/puppet, depending on your case.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Tried the site on Safari and Chrome (Snow Leopard) and it didn't really work, I could only select Rails, couldn't customise any options. Seems like a nice idea, and hopefully it's just some weird issue my end.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

I've checked the site on my MBP which is still running Snow Leopard and couldn't replicated what you were describing. (Although Safari does seem a bit slower than Chrome...)

Could you try it again?

pbreit• 14 years ago

Possible to make the scripts readable?

I would never run the scripts as directed but would be very interested in retrieving the script, reviewing it and then running it myself.

lnguyen24• 14 years ago

You can just run the wget command by itself and save the script to a file

  wget -q -O rb.sh 'https://rayburst.com/i/[server id]'

Then take a look directly at the rb.sh

At that point you can do either

  chmod +x rb.sh
  ./rb.sh

  bash rb.sh

to run the saved script

Show HN: Server installs simplified (and built from source)

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