Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy

by James Turnbull

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 capabilitiesCreate reporting solutions to more easily monitor automated outcomesExtend Puppet to perform tasks that are capable of suiting your organization's specific needsUse Facter to query server operating systems for key data such as IP addresses, server names, and MAC addresses Who this book is for

Ruby developers and system administrators. Table of Contents Introducing Puppet Installing and Running Puppet Speaking Puppet Using Puppet Reporting on Puppet Advanced Puppet Extending Puppet

Genres: Technology, Technical, Programming, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Bryan Mclellan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book didn't meet my needs in formatting before anything else. It's an absolutely terrible desktop reference, starting with the lack of a useful index. one may argue that the internet is a better reference because it's more up to date, but when you're learning a new language I've found it essential to be able to look up terms in the book sitting on my lap quickly.

I learn more by doing than by reading usually. As a tutorial the book spread the topics out into too many chunks. This didn't lead well to following along in the book as you try out some tasks.

Being the only puppet book on the market, it served the purpose of something to read at night a chapter at a time to fill in the concepts I was using during the day at work. I would recommend using it as such.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction to Puppet but I was left wanting. The book doesn't have an index and could have been about 100 pages to be really useful.

On the plus side the length meant I could finish it quickly and there are plenty of references to online material to help fill in the gaps.

[Mike Benner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book, but hard to get going with. It is slightly out of date. I recommend starting with the online tutorials first and then jumping to Chapter 3 and reading from there.

[Kevin Powe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good basic primer to Puppet Gave a strong grasp of the basic concepts, plenty of references throughout on where to dig for deeper information.

[Richard Slater · Rating 3 out of 5]

reasonable guide, good reference

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Insightful look at a neat tool.