Creating Puppet types and providers is easy…

kartar, 01/02/2010 | Source: Kartar.Net

Puppet types are used to manage individual configuration items.  Puppet has a package type, a service type, a user type, etc.  Each type has providers. Each provider handles the management of that configuration on a different platform or tool, for example the package type has aptitude, yum, RPM, and DMG providers (amongst 22 others – what is wrong with people that they need to invent new packaging systems… but I digress).

There are a lot of types, in fact I think Puppet covers a pretty good

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Writing puppet manifests that can remove resources as well as adding them

robin, 29/01/2010 | Source: yo61.com

I use puppet to manage the configuration of the machines I manage. So far, I've been rolling out new resources to machines but recently I've wanted to remove resources from machines. Here's how I modified my cron classes so I could remove cron jobs as well as create them.

When I first wrote my cron classes, I created a separate class for each cron job, eg.

class app::queue_processor::cron::cacheload {

    include
        user::base

    cron { cacheload:
        command => '/usr/bin/php
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Puppet 0.25.4 released!

kartar, 29/01/2010 | Source: Kartar.Net

You wanted “release early, release often” and the Puppet team has delivered!
The 0.25.4 release is a maintenance release (with one important feature – pre/post transaction hooks – discussed below) in the 0.25.x branch.  The release primarily addresses a regression introduced in 0.25.3 that caused issues with creating cron jobs.

The release is available

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Puppet Memory Usage - not a fatality

masterzen, 28/01/2010 | Source: Masterzen's Blog

As every reader of this blog certainly know, I’m a big fan of Puppet, using it in production on Days of Wonder servers, up to the point I used to contribute regularly bug fixes and new features (not that I stopped, it’s just that my spare time is a scarce resource nowadays).

Still, I think there are some issues in term of scalability or resource consumption (CPU or memory), for which we can find some workarounds or even fixes. Those issues are not a symptom bad programming or bad design. No,

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Put your ruby in my ERB

Nico, 27/01/2010 | Source: cd ~

Today I started installing a reverse proxy at $WORK. I choose to follow this way, and all my DNS data is stored in my CMDB. Once again, the solution came from #puppet ! You can embed some “pure” ruby code in ERB templates. And, yes, you can query your database !

<%
dbh = DBI.connect("DBI:Mysql:yourbase:mysql.mycorp.com", "you", "XXXX")
query = dbh.prepare("your fancy query")
query.execute
while row = query.fetch
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Better way to query facts

R.I. Pienaar, 14/01/2010 | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

Facter has some annoying bug where it won't always print all facts when called like facter fact, ones that require dynamic lookups etc just won't print.

This is a long standing bug that doesn't seem to get any love, so I hacked up a little wrapper that works better.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
 
require 'facter'
require 'puppet'
 
Puppet.parse_config
unless $LOAD_PATH.include?(Puppet[:libdir])
    $LOAD_PATH << Puppet[:libdir]
end
 
facts = Facter.to_hash
 
if
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Puppet, Chef, deterministic ordering and the much maligned DSL

kartar, 14/01/2010 | Source: Kartar.Net

This morning I came across a post entitled Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons why Puppet wins.  The post attempts to explain the differences between Chef and Puppet and why Puppet is superior.  The post wasn’t great IMHO, personally I thought it was fairly poorly reasoned and made some, potentially accurate, but throughly unsubstantiated claims.

Leaving aside the issues with the post itself though, it did prompt an interesting comment thread, particularly comments  between Opcode’s CTO Adam

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Let's meet

SPUG, 14/01/2010 | Source: SPUG

So let’s meet and kick off spug.ch. All interested puppeteers are invited!

Doodle says let’s meet on February 18th 2010 at 19:00. We will meet us at Eigerplatz 4 in Bern, which are the offices of Puzzle ITC (Location).

For future SPUG meetings we will meet at other locations of people participating in SPUG. If you’re interested in particiapte in SPUG, join the mailinglist and say helo.

So show up, give some insights in how you use Puppet in your company, project or on your machine.

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Puppet 0.25.3 – “Clifford” released!

kartar, 12/01/2010 | Source: Kartar.Net

CliffordPuppet 0.25.3 – code-named “Clifford”

The 0.25.3 release is a maintenance release in the 0.25.x branch.  The release addresses a regression introduced in 0.25.2 that caused issues with command execution.

The release is available at:

http://reductivelabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-0.25.3.tar.gz

http://reductivelabs.com/downloads/puppet/puppet-0.25.3.gem

http://gemcutter.org/gems/puppet

Please note that all final releases of Puppet are signed with the Reductive Labs

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Puppet 0.25.2 “Zoe” released!

kartar, 05/01/2010 | Source: Kartar.Net

Zoe the Muppet

Puppet 0.25.2 – code-named "Zoe"

The 0.25.2 release is a significant maintenance release (123 tickets closed!) in the 0.25.x branch.

Thanks to all who contributed to the release and tested fixes – especially (but not limited to!) Peter Meier (duritong), R.I. Pienaar (Volcane), Mark Plaskin, Dan Bode, Alan Harder, Ricky Zhou, Christian Hofstaedtler, Todd Zullinger, Till Mass, Nigel Kersten, and especially Markus Roberts and Jesse Wolfe who worked around the clock to get the release

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