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Comment by dabockster | Hacker News Reader

Oh yeah for sure. Linux is amazing in a computer science sense, but it still can't beat Windows' vertically integrated registry/GPO based permissions system. Group/Local Policy especially, since it's effectively a zero coding required system.

Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king.

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Debian (and thus Ubuntu) has full support for automated installs since the 90's. It's built into `dpkg` since forever. That include saving or generating answer to install time questions, PXE deployment, ghosting, CloudInit and everything. Then stuff like Ansible/Puppet have been automating deployment for a long time too. They might have added yet another way of doing it, but full stack deployment automation has been there for as long as Ubuntu existed.

> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king.

1. cloud-init support was in RHEL 7.2 which released November 19, 2015. A decade ago.

2. Checking on Ubuntu, it looks like it was supported in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in April 2018.

3. For admining tens of thousands of servers, if you're in the RHEL ecosystem you use Satellite and it's ansible integration. That's also been going on for... about a decade. You don't need much integration though other than a host list of names and IPs.

There are a lot of people on this list handling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of linux servers a day (probably a few in the millions).

> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid).

Preseed is not new at all:

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed

RH has also had kickstart since basically forever now.

I've been using both preseeds and kickstart professionally for over a decade. Maybe you're thinking of the graphical installer?

What?! I was doing kickstart on Red Hat (want called Enterprise Linux back then) at my job 25 years ago, I believe we were using floppies for that.

Yeah, I have been working on the RHEL and Fedora installer since 2013 and already back then it had a long history almost lost to time - the git history goes all the way back to 1999 (the history was imported from CVS, as it predates Git) and that actually only cover the first graphical interface - it had automated installation support via kickstart and a text interface long before that, but the commit history has been apparently lost. And there seems to have been even some earlier distict installer before Anaconda, that likely also supported some sort of automated install.

BTW, we managed to get the earlies history of the project written down here by one of the earliest contributors for anyone who might be interested:

https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.ht...

As for how the automated installation on RHEL, Fedora and related distros works - it is indeed via kickstart:

https://pykickstart.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Note how some commands were introduced way back in the single digit Fedora/Fedora Core age - that was from about 2003 to 2008. Latest Fedora is Fedora 43. :)

Still the king but developing/testing/debugging group policy issues is a miserable experience.

I always found it straight forward. Never had an issue and I've implemented my fair share on thousands on devices and servers.

Not an implementer of group policy, more of a consumer. There are 2 things that I find extremely problematic about them in practice.

- There does not seem to be a way to determine which machines in the fleet have successfully applied. If you need a policy to be active before doing deployment of something (via a different method), or things break, what do you do?

- I’ve had far too many major incidents that were the result of unexpected interactions between group policy and production deployments.

That's not a problem with group policy. You're just complaining that GPO is not omnipotent. That's out of scope for group policies mate. You win, yeah yeah.... Bye

I disagree. Group policies are extremely straightforward to administer in my experience.

That depends on how fine grained your targeting rules are. They can get insane.

I'm surprised no one has said NixOS yet.

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