Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Mastering Puppet deals with the issues faced when scaling out Puppet to handle large numbers of nodes. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your enterprise and allow many developers to work on your Puppet code simultaneously. In addition, you will learn to write custom facts and roll your own modules to solve problems. Next, popular options for performing reporting and orchestration tasks will be introduced in this book. Moving over to troubleshooting techniques, which will be very useful. The concepts presented are useful to any size organization. By the end of the book, you will know how to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Internet relay chat


If you have an internal Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server, using the IRC report plugin can be useful. This report sends failed catalog compilations to an IRC chat room. You can have this plugin installed on all your catalog workers; each catalog worker will log in to the IRC server and send failed reports. That works very well, but in this example we'll configure a new worker called reports.example.com. It will be configured as though it were a standalone master; the reports machine will need the same package as a regular master (puppetserver). We'll enable the IRC logging mechanism on this server. That way we only have to install the dependencies for the IRC reporter on one master.

The reports server will need certificates signed by puppet.example.com. There are two ways you can have the keys created; the simplest way is to make your reports server a client node of puppet.example.com and have Puppet generate the keys. We will show how to use the puppet certificate generate...