Puppet-2

Puppet-2

Puppet, from Puppet Labs, is a configuration management tool that helps system administrators automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of a server infrastructure. Planning ahead and using config management tools like Puppet can cut down on time spent repeating basic tasks, and help ensure that your configurations are consistent and accurate across your infrastructure. Once you get the hang of managing your servers with Puppet and other automation tools, you will free up time which can be spent improving other aspects of your overall setup.

Puppet comes in two varieties, Puppet Enterprise and open source Puppet. It runs on most Linux distributions, various UNIX platforms, and Windows.

In this tutorial, we will cover how to install open source Puppet in an Agent/Master setup. This setup consists of a central Puppet Master server, where all of your configuration data will be managed and distributed from, and all your remaining servers will be Puppet Agent nodes, which can be configured by the puppet master server.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you must have root access to all of the servers that you want to configure Puppet with. You will also be required to create a new Ubuntu 14.04 VPS to act as the Puppet master server. If you do not have an existing infrastructure, feel free to recreate the example infrastructure (described below) by following the prerequisite DNS setup tutorial.

Create Puppet Master Server

Create a new Ubuntu 14.04 x64 VPS, using "puppet" as its hostname. Add its private network to your DNS with the following details:

Hostname	Role	Private FQDN
puppet	Puppet Master	puppet.nyc2.example.com

If you just set up your DNS and are unsure how to add your host to DNS, refer to the Maintaining DNS Records section of the DNS tutorial. Essentially, you need to add an "A" and "PTR" record, and allow the new host to perform recursive queries. Also, ensure that you configure your search domain so your servers can use short hostnames to look up each other.

Using "puppet" as the Puppet master's hostname simplifies the agent setup slightly, because it is the default name that agents will use when attempting to connect to the master.

Now we need to set up NTP.
Install NTP

Because it acts as a certificate authority for agent nodes, the puppet master server must maintain accurate system time to avoid potential problems when it issues agent certificates--certificates can appear to be expired if there are time discrepancies. We will use Network Time Protocol (NTP) for this purpose.

First, do a one-time time synchronization using the ntpdate command:

sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Your system time will be updated, but you need to install the NTP daemon to automatically update the time to minimize time drift. Install it with the following apt command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install ntp

It is common practice to update the NTP configuration to use "pools zones" that are geographically closer to your NTP server. In a web browser, go to the NTP Pool Project and look up a pool zone that is geographically close the datacenter that you are using. We will go with the United States pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/us) in our example, because the servers are located in a New York datacenter.

Open ntp.conf for editing:

sudo vi /etc/ntp.conf

Add the time servers from the NTP Pool Project page to the top of the file:

server 0.us.pool.ntp.org
server 1.us.pool.ntp.org
server 2.us.pool.ntp.org
server 3.us.pool.ntp.org

Save and exit. Restart NTP to add the new time servers.

sudo service ntp restart

Now that our server is keeping accurate time, let's install the Puppet master software.

Install Puppet Master

There are a variety of ways to install open source Puppet. We will use the debian package called puppetmaster-passenger, which is provided by Puppet Labs. The puppetmaster-passenger package includes the Puppet master plus production-ready web server (Passenger with Apache), which eliminates a few configuration steps compared to using the basic puppetmaster package.

Download the Puppet Labs package:

cd ~; wget https://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-trusty.deb


Install the package:

sudo dpkg -i puppetlabs-release-trusty.deb


Update apt's list of available packages:sudo apt-get update

Install the puppetmaster-passenger package:

sudo apt-get install puppetmaster-passenger

The Puppet master, Passenger, Apache, and other required packages are now installed. Because we are using Passenger with Apache, the Puppet master process is controlled by Apache, i.e. it runs when Apache is running.