For those that are interested in learning a little bit more about Puppet, join me at the Iowa VMUG meeting on January 17th from 3-5. I’ll be giving a talk on Puppet and what it can do to automate your infrastructure. Should be a good (and informative) time.

I’ve been making my goals public for a few years now and 2013 is going to be no different. I haven’t always been the best at reaching my goals. At least, I’ve never been 100%. But that’s not always the point. The point is to put a marker ahead of you on the road of life and work your ass off to get there. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail. But its the try that makes us better no matter the outcome.

2012 is closing down and its time to review my goals for the year. Goal #1: Sleep More! SUCCESS! My goal was to average between 7-8 hours of sleep this past year which with all the other stuff I was trying to do I knew would be a challenge. So after tallying up the numbers, I posted an average of 7.03 hours per night. I know, I squeaked by on this one.

Earlier in this series I had mentioned the Puppet Dashboard and how we were going to discuss that at a later time. Well guess what kids, its that time. Server Installation For those needing a little background on the puppet server in this example, we’re running on a CentOS 6.3 box with both the EPEL and Puppet repositories configured and active. All puppet modules of coarse are coming from the puppet repo itself for the latest and greatest bits.

So maybe writing modules isn’t something you want to hassle with. Ok, that’s cool. Puppetlabs has provided a place where you can leach off of others. In this article, I will talk about how to use PuppetForge (forge.puppetlabs.com) There is a good chance that if you thought of a module to write, someone may have already done it and can save you a LOT of work. Most of the modules will support the big three Linux flavors out there, but not all so your results may vary with each and every module.