Yeah, so one nice advantage of our infastructure being 100% open source is that you can (and should) be able to install and test and play with it anywhere. :)
For puppet/ansible type things, if you have even a single fedora/rhel/centos machine you should be able to have ansible or puppet manage it locally. You don't need more than 1 machine to start out with.
The biggest issue we have with on-ramping new folks (IMHO) is that most of us 'full timers' don't have time to do a lot of one on one mentoring, so instead we try and have new people ask questions of everyone and try and do as much as possible themselves to get going. This means people who need more help or people who aren't very self starter tend to have a harder time getting involved.
I've been thinking of ways to improve things. I'm not sure test instances would really be that much help, as it should be easy to use any machine to play around with things.
Two ideas:
1. At our weekly meeting each week, we block off 15min and do a quick/short session where we talk about a particular application or tool and explain how it works, where docs are and what we want to do/need help with on it.
or, if thats too quick/not enough use:
2. Setup bi-weekly/monthly classroom sessions. Longer sessions, but the same idea of going over a tool/app/thing we want to get help on/bring people up to speed on. Or even a workshop/"office hours" where we go over specific easyfix tickets or the like.
Thoughts?
kevin