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 gone and written puppet-speedychains, which generates iptables chains outside of the one-rule, one-resource Puppet logic. This allows me to do thousands of results in a matter of seconds vs hours using the standard module.
- If you’re doing Puppet for any more than a couple of users and systems, at some point you’ll want to write a user module that takes advantage of virtual users to make it easy to select which systems should have a specific user account on it. I’ve open sourced my (very basic) virtual user module as a handy reference point, including examples on how to use Hiera to store the user information.
Additionally, I’ve been working on Pupistry lightly, including building a version that runs on the ancient Ruby 1.8.7 versions found on RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6. You can check out this version in the legacy branch currently.
I’m undecided about whether or not I merge this into the main branch, since although it works fine on newer Ruby versions, I’m not sure if it could limit me significantly in future or not, so it might be best to keep the legacy branch as special thing for ancient versions only.
Also not an original module by myself, but worth mentioning is my fork of thias/puppet-postfix at https://github.com/jethrocarr/puppet-postfix which makes it suitable for use on RHEL 7 systems. You’ll also want my spampd package for RHEL from https://repos.jethrocarr.com/ to get the spamassassin integration going.
I’ve now open sourced my SOE module as well, which will help you if you’re building from scratch:
https://github.com/jethrocarr/puppet-soe
I’ve since gone and built a full mail server module which makes building a mail server much easier. Check it out at https://www.jethrocarr.com/2016/09/25/building-a-mail-server-with-puppet/