The subject of this post may be misinterprated….or not.
To help search engines to find it more easily, the subject here is to give some tricks while using the puppet tool from www.puppetlabs.org which used to automatically administer large systems by allowing automated installations and configurations drifts detection.
These functionnalities are also available on some other tools, among them JBoss Operation Network (the drift feature is available since version 3.0), however puppet seems to gather of a larger adoption among the community.
While working at a customer, I met a sponsor so we decided to give it a large try.
Corporate customers often rely on a enterprise Linux distribution, and RHEL 5 is often a common guest in the party. Unfortunately, puppet is not a part of the distribution and you have to rely on the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository to make it available for installation.
To do so, simply add /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo with the following content:
[sourcecode]
[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 – $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/$basearch
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
[/sourcecode]
And then, perform the agent installation with:
[sourcecode]
sudo yum install puppet
sudo /etc/init.d/puppet start
[/sourcecode]
Fine, your puppet agent must be up and running. You can now have fun trying to write your own classes and manifest.
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