

Puppet 2.7 Released - sciurus
http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users/browse_thread/thread/ffe1345c165bf293#

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snprbob86
Can anyone point us towards good "server configuration management for dummies
(who happen to run startups)" documentation?

I've been looking at Puppet and Chef, but we're not just Rails anymore and I
can't imagine that the Ruby world's tools are the only popular ones. I just
don't know where to look for how to make an informed choice, how to get
started, etc. It feels like there is a large gap in available knowledge
between running a couple of processes on a single server and anything I'd
trust to some paying customers.

~~~
rmaccloy
Puppet and Chef are pretty agnostic. You can use them to manage only your
infrastructure (packages, user accounts, databases) and leave app deployment
up to something like capistrano or fabric if you like (although at a certain
level of app complexity it makes sense to integrate.)

cfengine has been around longer, but seems to have negative adoption since
puppet became well-known. I know a few people who swear by it, though.

FWIW, at my current startup I use Chef to manage a mid-sized collection of
servers (app, load balancers, DBs/replicas, task processors) where the app is
written mostly in Python, and it took a ton of pain out of scaling up to deal
with a very large paying customer two nights ago.

Puppet has better documentation, but learning either is a bit of a trial and
error process I think. You might find Blueprint
(<https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint>) useful to bootstrap (the authors
are around in the HN community, I think.)

~~~
howradical
Blueprint author here. Our goal is dead simple configuration management, so it
might be just what you need. Check it out and feel free to email me with any
questions matt@devstructure.com

Blueprint (<https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint>)

Blueprint I/O (<https://github.com/devstructure.com/blueprint-io>)

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dolinsky
I would love it if people would share their real world experiences with either
(or both) Puppet and Chef in dynamic environments that needed more than a few
servers to be maintained. In particular, polyglot persistent environments that
aren't necessarily tied to a particular framework requirement.

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jws
WTF is Puppet?

 _Puppet is an enterprise systems management platform that standardizes the
way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

By automating the provisioning, patching, and configuration of operating
system and application components across infrastructure, Puppet enables IT
staff to master their infrastructure even as complexity grows._

~~~
jarin
It's really similar to Chef, but I find Puppet way easier to work with.

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gog
I know tools like Puppet and Chef really shine when you have 'a lot' of
servers that you need to handle, but from my humble experience (only with
Chef) they can also make things more complicated then they should be if you
are not a heavy user.

I am not deploying Ruby applications so I really don't like the idea of
installing a bunch of software on my production servers. Not to mention that
chef also installed a compiler on my server and that is a big no-no in my
book.

Am I the only one that has an aversion of using these tools?

~~~
cparedes
I see where you're coming from - however, the great thing about CM tools is
that they abstract a lot of the weird differences between UNIX's and Linux
distributions. Defining a user in Puppet or Chef _will_ create that user the
same way, whether it's in RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc.

Puppet is also more lightweight than Chef in terms of the amount of
dependencies it requires, given an already existing installation of Ruby (in
fact, I think there's only one dependency: facter.) The only problem is that
it comes with a lot less available language features out of the box than Chef,
mainly because Puppet doesn't have a way to store and serve configurations of
other machines out of the box without something backing the data store, like
MySQL or CouchDB.

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Duff
I've been using Puppet for Linux servers and SCCM for Windows stuff... what's
missing for me is good out of band configuration verification.

Is there a good replacement for Tripwire out there? It's a great toolset for
change management and security, but is too expensive for my current
endeavours. I played with an open source tool a couple of years ago that kind
of sucked.

~~~
atsaloli
Cfengine has tripwire-like functionality. There is an example in the default
promises.cf that ships with Cfengine 3. (Look for "tripwire".)

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andrenth
What are the best practices for maintaining Puppet code in version control? Do
people usually keep separate branches for different kinds of machines (e.g.
webservers, SMTP servers, etc)? Is there a discussion about this documented
somewhere?

~~~
cparedes
Over at Seattle Biomed, we keep everything in the same branch (for now) - all
of our nodes are defined in nodes.pp, and we have modules that install
software/configuration files as needed. We include modules in the node
definition that should comprise the service we want to run on the server.

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IgorPartola
Actual release notes:
[https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Release...](https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/wiki/Release_Notes)

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jarin
Oh thank the heavens, this was literally the only thing keeping me from
upgrading my Rails apps to Ruby 1.9.x (all of my "serious" apps are deployed
via Moonshine).

