I’m heading to the IT Symposium this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I’ve posted here over the last year or so. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions.
Slides for presentation
Handouts for presentation
Update: So [...]
I had a user ask for Java to be installed on the cluster systems, so I started up by making a simple JRE5 module for puppet, but this first one didn’t quite work:
class jre5 {
package { “sun-java5-jre”:
ensure => latest;
}
}
It doesn’t work because Sun wants you to agree [...]
I had posted earlier about distributing stowed packages via rsync and puppet to my managed systems, but that method wasn’t quite what I wanted:
There was one more file to manage outside my regular puppet manifests, and I’d have to remember to keep them both up to date and in sync.
There wasn’t an easy way of [...]
Back at the infrastructures.org mothership, client configuration management is described as everything that makes a host unique and/or part of a particular group or domain. And for Unix-like systems, everything pretty much comes down to configuration files, services being enabled/disabled, and cron jobs.
Hmm.
Configuration files
Services
Cron jobs
Looks like Puppet pretty much handles all of that. As long [...]
The infrastructures.org folks list two primary goals of what they call “client file access“: first, consistent access to users’ home directories, and second, consistent access to end-user applications. Some of the things they warn against, such as automounters and the /net directory, we never thought of using to begin with. Their need to consider systems [...]