Is using Capistrano for user maintenance tasks on university lab feasible?

Posted by danielkza on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by danielkza
Published on 2013-10-28T00:23:21Z Indexed on 2013/10/28 3:56 UTC
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linux

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user-management

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capistrano

I've been looking around for tools to replace some legacy scripts for creating and maintaining accounts in a university computer lab ecosystem consisting of things like:

LDAP and Kerberos for authentication
User home storage and web pages
Entries on an SQL database
Printing quotas
Mailing lists, etc.

I'd also like to automate machine and VM membership for Kerberos and Puppet if possiible.

I've found Capistrano, and while the basic principle of running tasks on remote hosts through SSH seems to fit, and the DSL in Ruby looks quite nice, I've found most documentation is related to application deployment, not generic tasks. I'm also not aware of any good way to parameterize tasks so I can pass on the user information for creation.

Is something about Capistrano I am missing, or is it not the correct tool for this job? Are there any more userful alternatives?

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