Book Image

Puppet 4.10 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 4.10 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

Puppet 4.10 Beginner’s Guide, Second Edition, gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 4.10, including Docker containers, Hiera data, and Amazon AWS cloud orchestration. Go from beginner to confident Puppet user with a series of clear, practical examples to help you manage every aspect of your server setup. Whether you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about Puppet, you’ll learn Puppet skills that you can put into practice right away. With practical steps giving you the key concepts you need, this book teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more. Every example in this book deals with something real and practical that you’re likely to need in your work, and you’ll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions for what to type and what output you’ll see. All the examples are available in a GitHub repo for you to download and adapt for your own server setup.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Puppet 4.10 Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Users


A user on UNIX-like systems does not necessarily correspond to a human person who logs in and types commands, although it sometimes does. A user is simply a named entity that can own files and run commands with certain permissions, and that may or may not have permission to read or modify other users' files. It's very common, for sound security reasons, to run each service on a system with its own user account. This simply means that the service runs with the identity and permissions of that user.

For example, a web server will often run as the www-data user, which exists solely to own the files the web server needs to read and write. This limits the danger of a security breach via the web server, because the attacker would only have www-data's permissions, which are very limited, rather than root's, which can modify any aspect of the system. It is generally a bad idea to run services exposed to the public Internet as the root user. The service user should have only the minimum permissions...