/usr/share/doc/slack/FAQ is in slack 0.15.2-5.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 | What's so great about slack, then?
Nothing, really. The code is kind of a mess, and I'm sure you can
come up with better :)
People seem to like it, though, and if pressed, I'd say that it's
pretty simple to use, and probably close to what you want to be doing,
and that it doesn't tend to force some weird strict philosophy on you.
Also it probably gets major points for existing.
That's it?
Pretty much.
Are you associated with the Church of the Subgenius?
I don't *think* so...
What does the name stand for?
"Sysadmins' Lazy Auto-Configuration Kit". Yes, this was a "backronym" --
I named it "slack" on a dare (see CREDITS).
What is slack written in?
Perl
Why isn't it written in [insert language]?
I wanted to use an interpreted language that I didn't have to convince
sysadmins to install on their machines, and shell would have ended up
looking even worse than this Perl. Sometimes I do regret it, though.
:/
Shouldn't people be using (cfengine/conf packages/whatever)?
Probably. Feel free to try to convince them, but I'd like to stay out
of any config-management wars.
Well, then how does slack compare to other config management systems?
slack is both less capable and less complicated than most other config
management systems out there. Most people can figure out how to use
it with little documentation (not that we shouldn't write more...), but
all it can do is move files around and run some scripts. However, that
may turn out to be all you need.
Why did you write slack when all these other systems existed?
slack was designed for environments with no pre-existing config management,
and in which there was resistance among the admins to get over the up-front
costs of learning and implementing other config management systems. We saw
it as kind of a gateway to get lazy people into config management and
automated builds, so that they could later "trade up" to more sophisticated
systems.
Now, however, it seems that a lot of people don't need anything more
complicated than slack. That's fine by me; people should use what works best
for them.
How do I set up slack to use rsyncd over ssh?
1) Generate a public/private keypair for SSH
2) Put the private key on clients in /root/.ssh/slack-key
3) Add a stanza like this on clients to /root/.ssh/config:
Host slack-master
User slack
IdentityFile /root/.ssh/slack-key
4) Pick a master server, make a CNAME "slack-master" pointed at it
5) Install the slack-master package on that server
6) Put the public key on that server in ~slack/.ssh/authorized_keys (see the
example in /usr/share/doc/slack-master)
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