Automatic configuration managment through Puppet!

For those readers who are in the professional field of (Unix/Linux) systems administration, you would appreciate the difficulty in maintaining consistent configurations across multiple servers and workstations. This becomes tricky with remote management infrastructures like SNMP, LDAP user database, etc.

It would be really nice if there is some mechanism which follows user-defined rules to check individual machines for consistency, install required packages, start required services and check/update their configurations. This reduces the overhead of maintenance a lot, especially as the size of the network increases. Fortunately, Puppet is one such automatic configuration management tool that helps sysadmins manage individual machines through a simple declarative language similar to Ruby.

Puppet can be found at http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet

The advantage with Puppet is that sysadmins can share their way of managing a particular package/service (called Puppet Recipe) with other sysadmins. This way the effort put in by individual sysadmins gets distributed locally resulting in reusability of administration code. I've started using it at my work. Its really cool!!

Until we meet again,
Srini