Posts

Day 14 in the #vDM30in30 Image taken from Implementing Spacewalk into Company Infrastructure I’ve done a bunch of work with customers around patch management and packaging errata for CentOS, so I thought I’d talk about it a bit. What is errata? In the context of packaging, errata is basically listings from the package manager upstreams with updates for when CVE’s and vulnerabilities are found. So for official RHEL systems, this is available by default from the upstream, and the whole managed with Red Hat’s Satellite tool, which gets the information directly from RedHat’s infrastructure with your official paid login. ...

Day 13 in the #vDM30in30 Pretty quick one, but I thought I’d write it up because I hadn’t heard about it before. So, normally when trying to diagnose a puppet issue, one normally runs puppet agent -t or puppet agent --test. However, the --test flag comes with a set of predefined flags: –test Enable the most common options used for testing. These are ‘onetime’, ‘verbose’, ’no-daemonize’, ’no-usecacheonfailure’, ‘detailed-exitcodes’, ’no-splay’, ‘show_diff’, and ’no-use_cached_catalog’. ...

Day 12 in the #vDM30in30 I’ve been investigating getting metrics from the Java parts of Puppet. Puppetserver actually has a dedicated endpoint now, but if you’re on an earlier version you can actually extract the information straight from JMX. I’ve been working on a Vagrant stack to demonstrate this, but I’ve not got it fully working yet, but I’ve made some good progress. I think there’re just a few tweaks left. ...

Day 11 in the #vDM30in30 Image Source: http://www.slideshare.net/PuppetLabs/the-puppet-master-on-the-jvm-puppetconf-2014 There is an oft-repeated joke that says that there are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. We’re going to talk about caching with puppet-server. What is Puppet Server puppetserver is a replacement for the previous ruby and passenger engine (aka puppetmasterd) So puppetmaster was the old puppet server, puppetserver is now the current puppet-master. Remember, naming is hard! ...

Day 10 in the #vDM30in30 One thing that often comes up is customers or people in Slack/IRC asking “How do I setup X?” I often end up making basic Vagrant stack, as all the examples on Github are either too out of date or broken. I try and pin as many dependencies as possible, and make it as easy as possible to deploy, usually doing all the work with a vagrant up. ...