Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy

Competent system administrators know their success hinges upon being able to perform often tedious tasks with rigor and punctuality. Such metrics are often achieved only by instituting a considerable degree of automation, something that has become even more crucial as IT environments continue to scale both in terms of size and complexity. One of the most powerful system administration tools to be released is Puppet, a solution capable of automating nearly every aspect of a system administrator’s job, from user management, to software installation, to even configuring server services such as FTP and LDAP.

Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy is the first book to introduce the powerful Puppet system administration tool. Author James Turnbull will guide you through Puppet’s key features, showing you how to install and configure the software, create automated Puppet tasks, known as recipes, and even create reporting solutions and extend Puppet further to your own needs. A bonus chapter is included covering the Facter library, which makes it a breeze to automate the retrieval of server configuration details such as IP and MAC addresses.

What you’ll learn

• Properly install and configure Puppet in order to begin immediately maximizing its capabilities.
• Create reporting solutions to more easily monitor automated outcomes.
• Extend Puppet to perform tasks that are capable of suiting your organization’s specific needs.
• Use Facter to query server operating systems for key data such as IP addresses, server names, and MAC addresses.

Who is this book for?

Ruby developers and system administrators seeking to manage

About the Author

JAMES TURNBULL works for the National Australia Bank as a Security Architect. He is the author of Hardening Linux, which focuses on hardening Linux hosts, and Pro Nagios 2.0, which focuses on enterprise management using the Nagios open source tool.

James has previously worked as an executive manager for IT security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research foundation, manager of the architecture group of an outsourcing company, and in a number of IT roles in gaming, telecommunications, and government. He is an experienced infrastructure architect with a background in Linux/Unix, AS/400, Windows, and storage systems. He has been involved in security consulting, infrastructure security design, SLA, and service definition, and has an abiding interest in security metrics and measurement.