puppet

Way back in November 2011, I did an unusual thing: I co-presented a talk about Drupal and Continuous Integration/Deployment at DrupalCamp Toulouse, except that I was Skyped in from my home town of Melbourne, Australia :)

The talk is actually mainly presented by Greg Harvey of Code Enigma, one of my clients, and I just provide - well, I don't know, comic relief with my Australian accent? :)

I've been having weird, inconsistent bugs occur when running Puppet especially on new systems (where it's more obvious).

Specifically: I've seen cases where a manifest Notifies the apt-get update Exec to refresh the apt database, and suddenly the next series of package installs have failed with 'could not find package'.

During a rather boring conference a few weeks back, I decided to convert my own infrastructure from 'standalone puppet' (that is, a set of standalone puppet manifests that were executed by a basic shell script on each server I managed) to the 'client -> server' or 'puppetmaster' model (whereby a central puppet daemon controls the manifests, and servers connect to it for updates as 'clients'.)

You can read more about the different models here.