Re: [etch-users] couple of questions regarding etch

[Jason H. <jh...@ap...>]

On Mar 16, 2012, at 3:20 PM, George MacLachlan wrote:

> 1)    How widely distributed is this product and what is the current activity (update frequency, number
> of fixes per update)?

I know of two medium sized businesses running the current major version of etch, each managing somewhere in the 1000-5000 server range.  I used an older version of etch to manage over 20,000 servers in another company.  I also happen to run it on my two personal servers.

So it has been well tested in a few relatively large environments, but does not have the hundreds or thousands of small environments running it like some of the competing products (chef, puppet, cfengine).

Releases are fairly infrequent.  There were 2 in 2011, 3 (plus a minor release) in 2010.  You can look back through the archives of this mailing list to find more details of what was in each release.  The low rate of releases is mostly because etch is stable and seems to do what the folks using it need it to do.  We're overdue for a new release, there are some minor bug fixes and enhancements in subversion that should get pushed out.

You can view all the open tickets at the URL below.  As you can see there are only two defect tickets open and both are minor issues that haven't bugged anyone enough to fix.  The rest are feature enhancements of various sorts that might be nice to have but again not enough that anyone has done them yet.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/etch/report/1

>  2)    What is the level of support  ?

This mailing list is the primary and only support mechanism, short of hiring one of the developers or hiring your own developer.  If you have someone who knows or can learn ruby it wouldn't be that hard to dig into the etch codebase.  It's not that big, certainly much smaller than something like puppet or chef.

>   3)    Has anyone taken this implementation and migrated it to an enterprise version that can be
> licensed for a fee?

No.  I did that for the previous major release some years ago and there wasn't enough business to make it worthwhile.

>  4)    Are there any other software dependencies besides Ruby and Facter Library?

The only other thing, which is usually installed by default, is the cpio command.  And the client can be run in --local mode for initial setup, so that's all you need to get started.

The server has some more dependencies as listed on the GettingStarted wiki page.