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Microsoft Releases PowerShell DSC For Linux
jones_supa writes: Microsoft is announcing that PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for Linux is available for download in form of RPM and DEB packages. DSC is a new management platform that provides a set of PowerShell extensions that you can use to declaratively specify how you want your software environment to be configured. You can now use the DSC platform to manage the configuration of both Windows and Linux workloads with the PowerShell interface. Microsoft says that bringing DSC to Linux is another step in the company's "broader commitment to common management of heterogeneous assets in your datacenter or the public cloud." Adds reader benjymouse: DSC is in the same space as Chef and Puppet (and others); but unlike those, Microsofts attempts to build a platform/infrastructure based on industry standards like OMI to allow DSC to configure and control both Windows, Linux and other OSes as well as network equipment like switches, etc.
PowerShell is a modern shell.
Benefits: .NET Framework
- Object oriented, so no awkward parsing of strings. Every item is automatically delivered in its own capsule.
- Integration with other Windows subsystems and the
- Comes with a mini IDE called PowerShell ISE for developing scripts
- Excellent documentation with lots of examples (the Get-Help command)
- Intuitive, easy to remember command names
Every time I have used powershell it has been anything but intuitive or easy to remember.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Then there is some stupid security setting I remember always running into whenever I want to use it.
This makes it sound like you havent done really any research or significant work with powershell other than running one-liners when you need to do something that cant be done in GUI (like deal with Exchange certificates). When thats your exposure, yes, it looks clunky, but thats also ignorance speaking.
The command you want to do to get rid of that prompt is (as administrator) "Set-executionpolicy -Scope MachinePolicy -ExecutionPolicy bypass"-- this sets it forever.
Powershell looks "ugly" because it aims for clarity, not brevity. Commands are explicit in what they do, such that anyone even with no powershell experience could look at most powershell scripts and get a pretty good idea of whats happening; consider a common one-liner below:
Get-ADUser -Filter {Surname -eq "Smith"} | Foreach { Add-ADGroupMember -identity "Domain Admins" -member $_ }
The commands are wordy, but they explain exactly what they do, and each of the parameters are self-describing; you dont need to look at something like "tar -xvzf someFile" and say "gosh, what does the z switch do again".
Instead of trying to unreliably and painfully get out the data you want with a chain of cut, sed, awk, tr on a untyped text string etc you can just get what you want from a object.
All Unix shells are text-oriented. PowerShell is unique in that it is object-oriented and represents a big leap and innovation in shells.
What does powershell has that python or perl does not have?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I only see this causing issues.
1) Windows Admins writing power shell scripts to do stuff on linux boxes
a) setting permissions to 777 because they got in the way.
b) why will it not write the file to c:\?
c) A power shell script developed and tested on Windows, then pushed out to all the servers and crashing the Linux boxes.
c) Do you really believe that a Linux admin would allow a windows Admin to run a Power Shell script as root?
2) Linux Admins being asked to manage windows servers because "You know Power Shell" (If they can get the Linux admin to manage the 300 windows servers on top of the existing 500 Linux servers he manages, it saves them headcount and $$$)
Personally I see it going the way all the other Microsoft products have gone when they release a Linux version. It gets adopted by a few windows admins that are forced to work on linux. However the Linux admins and the bulk of Linux systems will never see it or use it. It will eventually get dropped because of the bugs, memory leaks, and issues that are found in it. Those that are never fixed because they concentrate on the Windows version and ignore the Linux version.
Judging from history it is another Embrace, Extend, Extinguish attempt. Microsoft is just pulling from it's old bag of tricks.
It moves binary blobs around, is poorly documented, and is hated or ignored by sane people. It sounds exactly like systemd.
Build a script library based on short mnemonic commands.
Powershell's naming conventions and basic script library is insanely verbose. Man I hate that language. Damned useful, to be sure, and light years better than any Windows automation tools that came before it, but how I long for commands like sed, ls, mv, cp, head, tail, and so forth.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.