Master of Puppet: System Management Made Easy

Want to build a better network? Start by building better administration tools. Puppet aims to spark a new generation of monitoring software.

Luke Kanies

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

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As networks grow larger and larger, as services become increasingly complex, and as turnaround times dwindle, a for loop and ssh just don’t cut it anymore. To keep up, system administrators need better tools. To get ahead, system administrators must share tools.

Puppet, written in Ruby and released under the GNU Public License, centralizes and unifies a significant number of system administration tasks. Better yet, Puppet is a toolkit to build other tools all of those standardized to run within Puppet.

Puppet is a centralized system administration package. A typical Puppet deployment includes one Puppet server and many Puppet clients. The Puppet server, which is usually given a CNAME of puppet to make it easy to locate, is the central repository for system configurations. Each Puppet client draws instructions from the Puppet server, such as update a system file, restart a service, or create a new user.

It’s most common to run Puppet in client/server mode; however, you can also use Puppet standalone to manage a single machine.

Pulling the Strings

Let’s jump in and create a client/server Puppet configuration. (See the Puppet Installation Guide for platform-specific installation instructions. Optionally, most distributions have packages for Puppet.)

Puppet configurations are built out of resources, or all of those things you have to maintain on your network packages, files, users, services, and so on. Resources are specified much like a hash would be in most languages:

user { luke: comment => "Luke Kanies", shell => "/usr/bin/bash", ensure => present...

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