I have been administering puppet installations for almost five years; FIVE years! I have always known that at some point, node management would become an issue. Unfortunately, I have never worked with an infrastructure that had massive numbers of exactly identical servers. I started by configuring nodes to inherit group definitions that were stored in another manifest. Then I saw the environments feature but never implemented it mostly due to overhead and the numerous and well documented bugs that will be solved in Puppet 4.
Category Archives: puppet
Work Work Work
Back at work, building our SAP Business Objects production infrastructure. I have automated as much as possible, so it will be easier to manage later down the road.
I wish SAP would actually produce valid documentation, nowhere did I find the actual database permissions the installer needed to complete the install. I ended up having to give the DBA_ALL role, which slightly scares me. If you cannot document the permissions your application needs then you are doing something wrong.
I do have some light at the end of the tunnel, I have scheduled a vacation to Key Largo for some scuba diving in the next few week. It will be a needed break.
Centralized Logging and Puppet
At $WORK I have been tasked with building a centralized logging infrastructure. After researching the available options I came across the following blog: edgeofsanity.net. The author is implementing centralized logging with Kibana and Logstash.
So I am following along, but since we only have 200 servers I am only building 2 servers, one to host Kibana and one running elasticsearch.
Filed under elasticsearch, linux, logstash, puppet, server