[LRUG] Chef or Puppet

[Daniel Barlow]

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Richard Taylor <richard at richt.co.uk> wrote:

> I wrote conman (sorry it's a bit rough round the edges), it was out of
> frustration for the ridiculous learning curve to get puppet or chef working
> for small-ish deployments.
>

This is what I've been doing lately.  My tips would be

(1) don't bother with the agent, at least initially.  Write a manifest on
the local machine, call it using "puppet apply" on the local machine.  When
you've got to grips with the config language and have something running that
works locally, your motivation for figuring out all the ssl certificates
will be that much greater.

(2) if your dns is in any way weird or less than perfect (often the case if
you're e.g. creating new VM images, or if you have multiple network
interfaces, or for all kinds of other possible reasons), puppet will have
trouble working its hostname out.  You can force it to use a specific
hostname for matching "node 'foo.example.com'" clauses by passing
"--certname foo.example.com" to "puppet apply".  You will get some warning
messages, which look like they are from other parts of puppet which want to
know the hostname for other reasons, but it works anyway.

(3) the "package/file/service pattern" described on the cheat sheet and on
the puppetlabs site is really worth absorbing
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