Pulling Strings With Puppet - James Turnbull [2]
Creating the Type .................................... 159
Properties ......................................... 161
Parameters ........................................ 161
Creating Our Provider ................................ 162
Distributing Our New Type ............................. 165
Resources .............................................168
About the Author
JAMES TURNBULL works for the National Australia Bank as a Security Architect. He is the author of Hardening Linux, which focuses on hardening Linux hosts, and Pro Nagios 2.0, which focuses on enterprise management using the Nagios open source tool.
James has previously worked as an executive manager for IT security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research foundation, manager of the architecture group of an outsourcing company, and in a number of IT roles in gaming, telecommunications, and government. He is an experienced infrastructure architect with a background in Linux/Unix, AS/400, Windows, and storage systems. He has been involved in security consulting, infrastructure security design, SLA, and service definition, and has an abiding interest in security metrics and measurement.
About the Technical Reviewer
DENNIS MATOTEK was born in a small town in Victoria, Australia called Mildura. Like all small towns, the chronic lack of good strong coffee drives the young to search further afield. Dennis moved to Melbourne where good strong coffee flows through the city in a river called the Yarra. However, it was in Scotland that Dennis was introduced to Systems Administration.
Scotland, on the technological edge, had 486DX PCs and a Vax. On arriving back in Melbourne, after staying awake for 24 hours at an airport minding his bags, Dennis was given a job interview-jobs in those days fell down like snowflakes from the sky.
Since that time, Dennis has stayed predominately in Melbourne working with IBM AS400s (iSeries) for 6 years and Linux for 7 years.
Dennis also wrote and directed some short films and plays. He has a lovely LP (life partner) and a new little boy called Zigfryd whom he misses terribly when at work, which is most of the time.
Acknowledgments
Luke Kanies-for writing Puppet and being kind enough to answer my numerous queries and questions.
The many members of the Puppet community who answered numerous questions and generally let me bother them.
Dennis Matotek for his technical review.
The team at Apress-Jason Gilmore, Joseph Ottinger, Beth Christmas, Ami Knox, Tina Nielsen, and Julie Miller-without all of you, none of this would be possible.
Jim Sumser for getting me started.
Introduction
This book introduces the reader to Puppet-a Ruby-based configuration management and automation tool for Linux and Unix platforms. The book is a beginning-to-intermediate guide to Puppet. It is aimed at system administrators, operators, systems engineers, and anyone else who has to manage Linux and Unix hosts.
This book requires a basic understanding of Linux/Unix systems administration including package management, user management, using a text editor such as vi, and some basic network and service management skills. If you wish to extend Puppet, you will need to have an understanding and some aptitude with the Ruby programming language. But for simple expansion of Puppet, basic Ruby skills are all that are needed. Additionally, as a programming language, Ruby is very approachable and easy to pick up.
The book starts with explaining how Puppet works and then moves on to installation and configuration. Each succeeding chapter introduces another facet of Puppet right up to demonstrating how you can extend Puppet yourself.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Puppet
Chapter 2: Installing and configuring Puppet
Chapter 3: Puppet's configuration language
Chapter 4: Using Puppet, which you learn through practical examples
Chapter 5: Reporting with Puppet
Chapter 6: Advanced Puppet features including integration with LDAP, performance management, and scalability
Chapter 7: Extending Puppet and Facter including