Tag Archives: puppet

Puppet Autosigning & Cloud Recommendations

I was over in Sydney this week attending linux.conf.au 2018 and made a short presentation at the Sysadmin miniconf regarding deploying Puppet in cloud environments. The majority of this talk covers the Puppet autosigning process which is a big potential … Continue reading

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Puppet Training

I recently ran a training session for our development team at Fairfax introducing them to the fundamentals of Puppet. To assist with this training, I’ve developed a bunch of scripts and learning modules which I’ve now open sourced at https://github.com/jethrocarr/puppet-training Using … Continue reading

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Building a mail server with Puppet

A few months back I rebuilt my personal server infrastructure and fully Puppetised everything, even the mail server. Because I keep having people ask me how to setup a mail server, I’ve gone and adjusted my Puppet modules to make them … Continue reading

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Faking a Time Capsule with a GNU/Linux server

Apple MacOS’s Time Machine feature is a great backup solution for general desktop use, but has some annoying limitations such as only working with either locally attached storage devices or with Apple’s Time Capsule devices. Whilst the Time Capsules aren’t bad … Continue reading

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Easy IKEv2 VPN for mobile devices (inc iOS)

I recently obtained an iPhone and needed to connect it to my VPN. However my existing VPN server was an OpenVPN installation which works lovely on traditional desktop operating systems and Android, but the iOS client is a bit more … Continue reading

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Secure Hiera data with Masterless Puppet

One of the biggest limitations with masterless Puppet is keeping Hiera data secure. Hiera is a great way for separating site-specific information (like credentials) from your Puppet modules without making a huge mess of your sites.pp. On a traditional Puppet master environment, this … Continue reading

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More Puppet Stuff

I’ve been continuing to migrate to my new server setup and Puppetising along the way, the outcome is yet more Puppet modules: The puppetlabs-firewall module performs very poorly with large rulesets, to work around this with my geoip/rirs module, I’ve … Continue reading

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Finding & purging Puppet exported resources

Puppet exported resources is a pretty awesome feature – essentially it allows information from one node to be used on another to affect the resulting configuration. We use this for clever things like having nodes tell an Icinga/Nagios server what monitoring … Continue reading

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Puppet modules

I’m in the middle of doing a migration of my personal server infrastructure from a 2006-era colocation server onto modern cloud hosting providers. As part of this migration, I’m rebuilding everything properly using Puppet (use it heavily at work so it’s … Continue reading

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Baking images with Packer & Pupistry

One of the common issues when building modern infrastructure-as-code style systems is that whilst automation is great, it also has a habit of failing at the worst possible time. There’s nothing quite like the fun of trying to autoscale only to find … Continue reading

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