The Cult of Gary

I’ve been meaning to describe how I handle EC2 and Puppet in an automated way. Part of the problem is getting your host certificates signed.
That question came up on Stack Overflow, so I described my solution there.

I used to rename my EC2 instances. That is, I would manually set the HOSTNAME variable in /etc/sysconfig/network. I usually didn’t have that many running, maybe two or three. Not everything was automated, so it was definitely helpful to see my hostname in the bash prompt instead of Amazon’s. Amazon’s hostname is based on the [...]

I’m starting to work on some perl code for my current gig. In the past, I’ve set up my own CPAN mirror and added my code to make installing perl modules a snap.
This time around, I’ve standardized on using puppet for automation. I was really hoping to use RPM’s for software installations, since this is integrated very nicely into [...]

The first puppet book is due to come out on February 4. It’s written by James Turnbull. I’ve queued for my next book order. 
There’s a whole world of puppet stuff I don’t know yet. I feel I’m still clubbing my automation problems with the puppet hammer. I find skimming a book usually gets me over the hump.  Then [...]

I did a yum update this morning and it seems to have broken my puppet server.
I use a CNAME entry when connecting puppet clients to the master server. As far as I can tell, something happened to cause ruby to care more about how the certificates are set up. The puppet clients were expecting the [...]

The Hyperic blog has a podcast interview with my new hero, Luke Kanies. I listened to it this morning while I was doing some other things. There’s some interesting insight into puppet. I think Luke does a good job of selling the concept of puppet. He says it’s only the beginning of the conversation on systems [...]

I’m really loving puppet. I was able to build an application server from scratch in about 20 minutes. 19 of them were watching progress bars and syslog output. I can magically reconfigure the systems as I go and any work on do for one system can be applied to all of them.
I was hunting around [...]

I’ve spent the afternoon playing with puppet. It’s brilliant and I wish I would have set it up sooner.
My test setup does the following:

creates a file called /tmp/hello_world
makes sure that screen and vim-enhanced
makes sure ntp is installed, running and configured to start (using the default config)
makes sure the perforce cli is installed
make sure snmp is [...]

Friday was my last day at the old job. It was a very bitter-sweet day. Eight years, two months is a long time to be anywhere in the IT world, especially since it has been my only real day job.
The weirdest part was handing in my key, swipe card and garage door clicker. My keychain [...]