kid in a candy store

Well, first great news. We found out yesterday that we’re having a baby boy! Should be fun!

Now, onto the geeky stuff….I finally found some time to sit down and start playing with Puppet. I’ve been reading through the docs and recipes and playing on a test server. This is a piece of software that is going to change how I work on a day-to-day basis. I’ve played around enough with it that I’m going to challenge myself to completely automate the configuration of our environment from the time the servers are turned over to us until they hit production. I would say from bare metal, but we don’t do bare metal builds….the boxes are turned over to us from our hosting provider with a base CentOS distro on them from which we build out our configs.

I’m excited. Very very excited. I can see the potential in the ability to use Ruby ERB templates to set up apache VirtualHost configs. I see it automating our Mono installs. I see lots of things….now I just have to iterate to get everything to where I need to be. I’ve got the rpmfusion repo install, snmpd, ntp, nrpe, /etc/sysctl.conf, and sudo configs automated. I need to audit our environment and fix mismatched UID and GID’s, then find a good recipe for managing users and authorized key files. It’s going to be some work, but will be awesome when it’s done.