Puppet: configuration management made easy

[ Thanks to Sam
Varghese for this link. ]

“Like any open source project, Puppet is reasonably
well documented but there are some areas where documentation is
written by developers and occasionally a bit light on, says
Turnbull. “I started adding documentation, and next thing I know,
Luke Kanies, the primary developer of Puppet, was saying, ‘look,
there’s this wiki over here, can you look after that?'”

“As time went on, Turnbull found himself managing a lot of
tickets and a lot of the release-related things. He was nominated
as the release manager for the project. “And beyond that, it
occurred to me that this would be a viable topic to write about, so
I wrote a book about it as well,” he says.

“Puppet can be used to manage small and large enterprise assets.
It is principally UNIX-based and runs on GNU/Linux, OSX, HPUX, AIX,
Solaris and all the BSDs. It is designed to be able to automate the
process of configuring a host.

“”It doesn’t do PXE boot or anything like that – the next step
after you’ve done your initial install of your host is to add a
Puppet client and then to configure your hosts,” says Turnbull. “It
does this through a master in the environment which contains all
your configuration and it knows the particular host and the
particular questions posed, so it can answer them in a particular
way.”

Complete
Story