Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: file resource type, apache class, master daemon, Red Hat, Turnbull Speaking Puppet, Turnbull Using Puppet (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Competent system administrators know their success hinges upon being able to perform often tedious tasks with rigor and punctuality. Such metrics are often achieved only by instituting a considerable degree of automation, something that has become even more crucial as IT environments continue to scale both in terms of size and complexity. One of the most powerful system administration tools to be released is Puppet, a solution capable of automating nearly every aspect of a system administrator’s job, from user management, to software installation, to even configuring server services such as FTP and LDAP.

Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy is the first book to introduce the powerful Puppet system administration tool. Author James Turnbull will guide you through Puppet’s key features, showing you how to install and configure the software, create automated Puppet tasks, known as recipes, and even create reporting solutions and extend Puppet further to your own needs. A bonus chapter is included covering the Facter library, which makes it a breeze to automate the retrieval of server configuration details such as IP and MAC addresses.

What you’ll learn

• Properly install and configure Puppet in order to begin immediately maximizing its capabilities.
• Create reporting solutions to more easily monitor automated outcomes.
• Extend Puppet to perform tasks that are capable of suiting your organization’s specific needs.
• Use Facter to query server operating systems for key data such as IP addresses, server names, and MAC addresses.

Who is this book for?

Ruby developers and system administrators seeking to manage

About the Author

James Turnbull manages the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) at the National Australia Bank. He is also a member of Linux Australia, including sitting on the Executive Council in 2008, and is currently on the committee of Linux Users of Victoria.

James has previously worked as an executive manager for IT security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research foundation, manager of the architecture group of an outsourcing company, and in a number of IT roles in gaming, telecommunications, and government.

He is a contributor to a number of open source projects and regularly speaks on topics related to writing, systems administration, and open source technologies.

He is the author of three other books:

• Pulling Strings with Puppet: Systems Administration Made Easy, about the Ruby-based Puppet configuration management tool.
• Hardening Linux, which focuses on hardening Linux bastion hosts including the base operating system, file systems, firewalls, connections, logging, testing your security and securing a number of common applications including e-mail, FTP and DNS.
• Pro Nagios 2.0 focuses on enterprise management using the Nagios open source tool.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Apress (February 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599780
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599785
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #254,600 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book, but more would be better..., December 18, 2008

By	P. Boin - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I liked what was in this book. It's a good overview of what puppet can do, with examples.

The one thing that's missing, and it's driving me crazy is that it doesn't have an index! That's maddening for a reference book. In a perfect world, I'd like to see some more best practices and some suggestions for how to transition running machines on to puppet.

Overall, a 'buy', but bring your own sticky notes to mark important pages...

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars No index? In a technical book? Really?, February 6, 2009

By	p z (Bay Area, CA United States) - See all my reviews

It's nice to have the puppet documentation in book form, but if you want to look something up, you're still left with Google: this book has no index.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Must Have for Puppet admins, July 20, 2008

By	A. Martinez (Southwestern USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is definitely a vital reference for anyone who's working with puppet; I picked it up after becoming frustrated with the current state of available information on puppet, and it turned my perspective around completely.

I'm not sure that I would have managed to learn everything I needed to about puppet using only the docs on the website; often I got the familiar feeling when reading through the wiki that some crucial bit of information was being assumed, but this book always backed up its information with examples that I could use to grasp the idea being presented.

On thing to note about the book -- It's really not structured to be a quick-start guide, but rather each chapter lays a foundation of knowledge that the next chapter builds upon. As such, I'd recommend setting aside a couple of afternoons to read through the book, ideally before you even begin to set up your puppet environment.