Spending the last three months learning Puppet is starting to pay off.
Learned the puppet 'language' which is Ruby. More-or-less. Wrote some really lame classes. Re-wrote them. Spent some time learning how not to use the tool. I'm now on the third or fourth iteration of that cycle. Got things humming along in a pilot. Now I'm pushing it to production ...
Last night I extracted a host from template. This morning I added the classes to it's .pp file, launched the agent and .. thirty minutes later I had a host running with all of our company-specific bits on it, security locked down, postfix running correctly, and so on and so forth.
A day-long process [1] now completes in thirty minutes. One minute of typing, twenty-nine watching the server configure itself. Click and go, man. Click and go, baby.
[1] Three man-hours but honestly, it's really hard around the office to just do one thing for three hours without interruption. So we'll call it 'a day'.
Learned the puppet 'language' which is Ruby. More-or-less. Wrote some really lame classes. Re-wrote them. Spent some time learning how not to use the tool. I'm now on the third or fourth iteration of that cycle. Got things humming along in a pilot. Now I'm pushing it to production ...
Last night I extracted a host from template. This morning I added the classes to it's .pp file, launched the agent and .. thirty minutes later I had a host running with all of our company-specific bits on it, security locked down, postfix running correctly, and so on and so forth.
A day-long process [1] now completes in thirty minutes. One minute of typing, twenty-nine watching the server configure itself. Click and go, man. Click and go, baby.
[1] Three man-hours but honestly, it's really hard around the office to just do one thing for three hours without interruption. So we'll call it 'a day'.
