James Turnbull
Pulling Strings with
Puppet
Configuration Management Made Easy
CHAPTER 1 Introducing Puppet 1
CHAPTER 2 Installing and Running Puppet 11
CHAPTER 3 Speaking Puppet 41
CHAPTER 4 Using Puppet 89
CHAPTER 5 Reporting on Puppet 121
CHAPTER 6 Advanced Puppet 131
CHAPTER 7 Extending Puppet 153
Books for professionals By professionals®
Pulling Strings with Puppet:
Configuration Management Made Easy
Dear Reader,
Configuration management and automation of technology have become increasingly
important in IT Environments have become more complex and extensive, keeping
costs low has become critical, and operational errors have increasingly become the
cause of outages New techniques, methodologies, and tools for managing infrastruc-
ture are needed This book details one such tool, Puppet: a Ruby-based open source
configuration management and automation tool for Linux and Unix platforms
With Puppet, a central master host securely manages and configures remote hosts
Puppet uses an abstraction language to describe the configuration of your hosts It
then takes care of implementing that configuration on your hosts You can configure a
particular package to be installed, and Puppet will handle its installation on Linux and
Unix platforms like Debian, Red Hat, Solaris, AIX, OS X, and a number of other plat-
forms without your needing to know how to manage packages on those platforms
This book introduces you to Puppet and how to install and configure it It demonstrates
how Puppet can configure your environment with extensive examples I’ll show you how
Puppet can manage packages, services, users and groups, files, and a wide variety
of other configuration components on your hosts
The book also looks at Facter, Puppet’s system inventory tool, which interrogates
and makes use of data on your hosts to customize per host configuration You’ll learn
how to report on your configuration with Puppet and how to extend it and Facter to
meet the requirements of your environment
By the end of this book, you’ll discover how easy it is to build an efficient, cost-
effective, powerful, and automated configuration management system that will make
administrating your hosts simple and your life easier
James Turnbull
Author of
Pro Nagios 2.0
Hardening Linux
Turnbull
Pulling Strings w
ith Puppet
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User level:
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