How to enable the GUI / disable headless mode on a puppetlabs Beaker SUT.

How I wrote isolated acceptance tests for Netflix Ice Puppet installation using a locally-backed S3 API server.

A description of the algorithms used by Yum and RPM to compare package versions.

I have a few more custom facts that I’ve added to my puppet-facter-facts github repository:

• syslog_bin, syslog_type, and syslog_version
  • tell the absolute path to the running syslog binary, its short name (basename), and its version as a string. Currently only know about /sbin/syslogd and /sbin/rsyslogd.
• has_netbackup
  • tests …

I’m unfortunatey stuck, at least for the time being, using flat-file manifests to configure my puppet nodes. Without an ENC, it’s pretty difficult to get a good ovewview of what classes are used on each node, and what nodes use a given class. I know I could write …

For anyone else who sets the Puppet config_version paramater to return the current SVN or Git version of your configuration, here’s a fact that grabs that version (by parsing the cached YAML catalog) and sets it as a fact called “catalog_config_version”. It can then be used for sanity-checking your …

We use Puppet Dashboard at work to view the status of our puppet nodes. While it’s very handy, there’s one feature I really wanted: the ability to show the value of arbitrary puppet facts in the main node table on the home page. Specifically, the facts we use …

If you keep up with news on the ‘net, you may have heard about photo sharing startup Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook for $1 Billion just 9 days after they released their Android app. Well, not only are they based mostly on open source software (well, yeah, pretty much …

Using GraphViz to describe configurations is relatively popular in the software and systems architecture world; the simple text-based format makes it quiet simple, and the directed graph (dot file) is a simple method to store a graph of information flow or component relationships. Puppet includes builtin support for generating dot …

Update November 2013: This post has brought an amazing amount of traffic to my blog, probably because it still seems to be one of the only ENC comparisons out there. Both Dashboard (and Puppet Enterprise Console) and The Foreman have changed quite a bit since I wrote this. Foreman has …