Preview162.jpg' alt='Change Routeros Software Idea' title='Change Routeros Software Idea' />Searching for Best Proficient in microsoft office. Hire top Proficient in microsoft office Freelancers or work on the latest Proficient in microsoft office Jobs Online. Change Routeros Software Idea' title='Change Routeros Software Idea' />Matt Dyson Blog. Dawn Of War 2 Downloadable Content. For just over 1. 2 months, Ive been using Puppet as a way of configuring the various machines I have dotted around my home network. The initial desire to move to an automated configuration management tool was to keep tabs on the various requirements across pieces of software I run, however Ive now moved to the point where all deployments of new hardware and software both my own, and third party are all managed through Puppet, and life is much simpler most of the time. Ive been meaning to write this post for a while, mainly as a getting started point for anyone who is thinking about embarking on a similar journey, hopefully this will help people avoid making some of the same mistakes I made along the way4 Easy Steps to Configure a MikroTik Router. MikroTik router basic configuration includes assigning IP addresses and enabling NAT for accessing internet. So you have been playing Counter Strike for a while and are thinking about setting up your own server. There are many guides on installing a Half Life Dedicated. Firstly, a little about my network, to give some of the points context. Over the last 5 years, Ive evolved from having a single desktop machine, to today having the same desktop, 2 microservers one for mass storage, the other for backup, services and acting as the Puppetmaster, a Home Theatre PC, and 7 Raspberry Pis in various guises an alarm clock, appliance monitors and TV encoder between them. All of these machines were originally configured manually, and re imaged from scratch every time something went wrong, leading to endless pages of scribbled notes about various requirements and processes to get things working. Now, all of them pull a catalogue from a single Puppetmaster, which I update as requirements change. Adding a new host is a matter of installing a fresh operating system, installing Puppet, and adding a few lines to the Puppetmaster detailing what I want installed the rest is taken care of Ive ended up using Puppet for much more than I originally imagined, including SSH Keys. My. SQL hosts databases. Apache site configuration. Tomcat configuration auto deploying apps is on my to do listSendmail. Automated backups. Media sorting. ZNC configuration. Plus even more besides thatMost bits of my own software run through supervisord, which is also configured through Puppet. The first, and arguably most important lesson I learned through my Puppet isation process is to keep the configuration in some sort of versioning system. Initially I did not keep track of the changes I was making to Puppet manifests, and requirements that were added at 3am seemed completely illogical in the cold light of day but by self documenting the manifests as I went along, and tracking changes through my own Subversion repository, I can look back at the changes Ive made over time, and save myself the hassle of accidentally removing something essential. Ive lost track of the number of times Ive had to revert back to a previous configuration, and having a system in place to do this automatically will definitely help you in the long run While writing your configuration, Ive learnt to be explicit about your requirements. A lot of the modules and class definitions I wrote early on did not use any of the relationships you can define between attributes, and as a result Id often be bitten by the Puppet parser attempting to configure things in an illogical order. For the sake of adding a few arrows into your manifests, its worth using these just to avoid the head bashing when a configuration run fails intermittentlyI still run into problems when configuring a new host, when a package I require isnt installed in time to start up a service using relationships from the ground up will hopefully avoid this ever becoming an issue. Arguably the second most useful tool I installed after Puppet itself is the Puppet Dashboard. This fantastic tool pulls in the reports that Puppet generates, and spits them out into a very readable format which allows you to get straight to the heart of whats causing failed runs, rather than having to resort to diving through the depths of the raw logs. The Sims 1 Gothic Objects. It took me a while getting around to installing this, and I honestly regret not installing it straight away it has saved me an incredible amount of time since. A word of warning though the logs can take up an awful lot of space my dashboard database is 4. MB with only the last 3 months data stored make sure your SQL server is up to the task before starting thisWhile installing things like the Puppet Dashboard, heira and the like, Ive taken to Puppet ing your Puppet, by which I mean writing the configurations for these tools into your Puppet manifests. Initially this seemed very strange to me, I didnt want some almost sentient piece of software configuring itself on my machine However, the client will quite happily run on the same machine as the server to configure itself in a strange cyclical dogfooding loop. There are plenty of third party modules available that will do a lot of this for you, but I ended up writing my own for several things as long as the installation is managed somehow, youre going to have a much better time Linked to that, and my last tip that Ill post here, is to write your own modules wherever you can. For the first few months after starting using Puppet, I tried to cram everything imaginable into the main manifest directory, and barely used templates and source files at all. Subsequently Ive learned to separate the concerns wherever possible, which leads to much cleaner code in the module definitions, and much nicer looking node definitions as well. Third party modules have been a mixed blessing for me, some of them have been coded extremely well to allow multi platform support, but some have been hard coded to alien platforms making them useless to me. Id absolutely recommend going looking for someone else whos done the hard work first, but dont be afraid to roll up your sleeves and write a module yourself. Maybe even post it online for other people to enjoy Im very hypocritical making that last point, none of my modules have made it online as theyre all terribleI hope that some of the above might help steer someone in the right direction when embarking on a journey with Puppet. Obviously Id recommend some more official reading before converting your professional network of 1.