A simple matter of…

Another month, another LUG meet. This month it was another meeting with SurreyLUG kindly arranged by Dominic. All three speakers were from HantsLUG though - including an Ubuntu Developers Conference talk by Alan Pope and one on bitlbee by Tony Whitmore.

The first talk up one by yours truly about puppet. I was intending it to be more of a quick demo than anything else, but there were many questions about the initial network boot install, and the Debian preseeding process. There was then a discussion about the merits of various methods which I should have stopped after a few minutes once we reached the “going around in circles” point.

The main point I was trying to get across is that automated installs (whether image based or preseed based) don’t actually solve how you maintain boxes in the long term. Re-imaging, packages or cluster-SSH solutions are not quick. The ability to use templates is wonderful. Even better when I hit a problem (e.g. /var/lock/apache being owned by root not www-data) then I can add the “fix” into puppet and never have to worry about it again.

Annoyingly I hit the “slow puppet” problem again - I thought I’d found and fixed it at home (where it was the lack of a reverse DNS record on the puppetmaster for the puppet slave). I’ve moved laptop and upgraded/changed puppet versions and virtualisation software versions. More investigation required. If it wasn’t for that then I could have done a bit more on the puppet side to demo the power and benefit.

The slides and video for the talk are available from the HantsLUG site as usual