Puppet

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.

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. Puppetlabs is working on improving that, but its something to keep in mind as we go through this article.