Craig Dunn

Talk: Understanding the Data Lookup Pattern

In February 2018 I had the pleasure of attending Config Management Camp 2018 to give a talk alongside Jan Ivar Beddari (@beddari). For this talk I drew on some of the topics discussed in my previous post Understanding Hierarchical Lookups and then introduce Jerakia as a generic tool to provide

Managing Puppet Secrets with Jerakia and Vault

Introduction and History Over the past couple of years I’ve talked a lot about a project called Jerakia. Jerakia is a data lookup system inspired by Hiera, but built to be a stand-alone solution that is decoupled from Puppet, or any particular configuration management system that not only offers

Solving real world problems with Jerakia

Background I’ve always been a great admirer of Hiera, and I still remember the pain and turmoil of living in a pre-Hiera world trying to come up with insane code patterns within Puppet to try and organize my data in a sensible way. Hiera was, and still is, the

Puppet data from CouchDB using hiera-http

Introducing hiera-http I started looking at various places people store data, and ways to fetch it and realized that a lot of data storage applications are RESTful, yet there doesn’t seem to be any support in Hiera to query these things, so I whipped up hiera-http, a Hiera back

I’m joining Puppet Labs

Back in September last year I flew over to the US for PuppetConf 2011, and more recently took a trip to Edinburgh for PuppetCamp. Both times when I returned my wife asked me how it went, and both times my answer was simple; “I’ve gotta work for these guys!

Designing Puppet – Roles and Profiles.

Update, Feb 15th. Since writing this post some of the concepts have become quite popular and have generated quite a lot of comments and questions in the community. I recently did I talk at Puppet Camp Stockholm on this subject and hopefully I might have explained it a bit better

Introducing hiera-mysql MySQL Backend for Hiera

Introduction Some time ago I started looking at Hiera, a configuration datastore with pluggable back ends that also plugs seamlessly into Puppet for managing variables. When I wrote hiera-gpg a few months ago I realised how easy extending Hiera was and the potential for really useful backends that can consolidate

Secret variables in Puppet with Hiera and GPG

Last week I wrote an article on Puppet configuration variables and Hiera. This almost sorted out all my configuration variable requirements, bar one; what do I do with sensitive data like database passwords, hashed user passwords…etc that I don’t want to store in my VCS repo as plaintext.

Puppet configuration variables and Hiera.

Managing configuration variables within Puppet has always given me a bit of a headache, and I’ve never really found a way to do it that I’m all together happy with, particularly when dealing with the deployment of complex applications that require a lot, sometimes hundreds, of different configuration

Puppet, Parameterized classes .vs. Definitions

Firstly, a little background on this topic. During PuppetConf this year I attended a very interesting talk by Digant C. Kasundra about the Puppet implementation at Stanford University. At one point he asked, “Who uses definitions?”, and I raised my hand. The next question was, “Who uses parameterized classes?”, and

Configuring Tomcat properties files with Augeas and Puppet.

Introduction This post covers quite a few different things, it is taken from a real-world example of something I was asked to do recently which not only involved some cool Puppetmastery using exported resources, storeconfigs and custom definitions, but also forced me to start learning Augeas, which I’ve been

Puppet – working with define based virtuals

Define Based Virtuals Define-based virtuals are quite a powerful feature of Puppet, but many people either don’t understand them or don’t know how to apply them effectivly to their manifests. Due to Puppet’s normalized configuration structure, you can’t configure the same resource in two different places.

Preventing users from changing their password with PAM

Blocking AD users from using passwd I had to design a system recently for a client which has a mixture of local users and remote users that are authenticated using LDAP against Active Directory (actually, with Quest Authentication Services running in between). One of the requirements was that AD users

Software review: Rundeck

I’ve been looking around lately for something that can handle command-and-control automation across an estate of Linux servers. My requirements are to be able to run jobs and tasks remotely, either ad-hoc or at specified times and capture the results in a meaningful and useful way. I’ve come

Part 1: Installing puppet 2.6.1 on CentOS with YUM/RPM

Installing Puppetmaster 2.6.1 Assuming, like me, the thought of letting rubygems vommit all over your filesystem is not a pleasant one, then how to get the latest puppet 2.6.1 installed on CentOS 5.5 with yum isn’t very clear. Things may differ on other peoples

Part 2: Puppet 2.6.1, configure puppetmaster and puppetd

Configure Puppetmaster For installing puppetmaster 2.4.1 on CentOS please click here for Part 1 In Part 1 we covered installing the Puppetmaster and Puppetd packages on Centos 5.5. We will now configure a very basic client/server model to serve the /etc/resolv.conf file to our

Part 3: Installing puppet-dashboard on CentOS / Puppet 2.6.1

Puppet Dashboard Puppet dashboard is a fairly new app with loads of future potential and is great for monitoring your puppet estate. This is a quick guide to getting it running on puppet 2.6.1. Be sure you have the correct yum repos and ruby versions installed, see Part

Remote control with expect-lite

I’ve recently been playing around with expect-lite, a wrapper for expect that allows you to automatically login to hosts with telnet or ssh to run commands on remote hosts without getting too much under the bonnet of expect syntax. But for my purposes I needed to do a little

Google CL : Google services from the command line!

In an utterly refreshing change to the bombardment of point-and-click GUI’s Google have released a command line utility suite to interact with various services including Blogger, YouTube, Google Calendar and Contacts. Better yet, it’s written in python making it OS agnostic. If you’re an Ubuntu user it