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asking “How do I setup X?” I often end up making basic Vagrant stack, as all the examples on Github are either too out of date or broken.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. ...
Day 8 in the #vDM30in30 When you’re beginning with Puppet, it can be difficult to troubleshoot and debug issues with Puppet code. What many people don’t know is that there are a bunch of useful cache files that can be used to help with this debugging. I’ve got a box I’ve classified as a graphite and grafana machine with Puppet, and I want to find out whats going on. Most of them can be found in the statedir: ...
Day 5 in the #vDM30in30 Cockpit is RedHat’s GUI for system administration. It’s actually installed on Fedora by default now, but it can run on most operating systems (there’s repos for Arch, Debian, CentOS and Ubuntu). RedHat are already using it as the main way of interacting with RHEV, their libVirt virtualization platform and it’s installed as a part of OpenShift, their PaaS for container orchestration. It includes a bunch of tooling for your standard sysadmin tasks: ...
Day 4 in the #vDM30in30 One of the things that comes up a lot with Puppet code is testing, particularly acceptance testing. Just like with regular code, you want to make sure that changes to Puppet are not going to break the standard use-case for your module. Travis has been a boon for open-source testing. For a while, Travis was only for the syntax, linting and rspec tests. But in the last year they’ve added the ability to have Docker running in a Travis job. ...
Day 1 in the #vDM30in30 So, recently I was working with someone who was having issues with hiera lookups not working. Debugging hiera can be a bit of a pain, because it’s not super good at explaining what’s going wrong. Luckily, Ben Ford, former PSE, now Education person at Puppet and generally awesome dude has made an awesome tool to do just that: hiera_explain It’s a way more verbose and explanatory way of doing everything, and the person I was working it loved it when I showed it on my test machine. ...