As a user of the free version of the Puppet Dashboard, I’m always looking for little tips and tricks that can make it more useful in my day to day job. Some of the features that you find in the Puppet Enterprise (PE) version are available in the free version, it just takes a bit of time and effort to get working for you.

One of those features was recently brought to my attention by a co-worker. In the Puppet Dashboard, its possible to have the facts of your node presented within the web UI. PE does this by default, but in the open source version you have to do a little wrench turning to get it working. My co-worker had already gotten it working on our production environment, but I wanted to see what it took to get running in my lab.

For those interested in getting a quick overview of Puppet, I’ll be speaking at the DSM Web Geeks meeting on March 4th. Check out their web site for details.

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. But its an improvement over the middle of the year when I was still sub 7 hours.