Installing Puppet master and Puppet agent is not at all a difficult task. In this post we will go through the steps for installation.

We had a look at puppet facter in my previous post How Does Puppet Work. Now facter can be considered as an inventory management tool for puppet. It returns information about each node to puppet master, based on which puppet master will fetch the configurations, and submit to the node.

My previous Tutorial about puppet was just an introduction to puppet configuration management tool. In this tutorial we will once again go through puppet and will try to understand how really does puppet configuration management tool works.

The normal and usual configuration of puppet consists of a server (Puppet Master) and a client(Puppet agent).

How Does Puppet Work?

It works like this..Puppet agent is a daemon that runs on all the client servers(the servers where you require some configuration, or the servers which are going to be managed using puppet.)

A system administrator's job primarily consists of configuring, deploying and maintaining server machines. There are tasks that are very challenging and interesting at times, but most of the daily routine, consists of many boring and repetitive tasks.

Almost all system administrator's, try to get rid of those repetitive, and boring tasks with the help of scripting and automating them. But there are issues with scripting and automating also.

• Scripts which are custom made to solve or automate a task, are seldom documented, published or announced.

• Enhancements to these scripts happen in a random manner.

Let me begin this tutorial by a famous UNIX statement which emphasizes the main underlying working model of Linux operating system. The statement is that "Everything Is a File".

If you are one of that person who spends a lot time with Linux or any NIX system, then you might have already understood that statement. Each and everything in Linux is accessed by a file. To make that much more clear, even block devices like Hard disks,and CD/DVD's are nothing other than a file(yeah but a special file..but a file).

This post is dedicated to one of our friend "Kingsley Andrew Uzoma". Installing Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution after you already have the windows operating system installed on your machine can be quite tricky at times.

The main problem people face in doing this are as follows.

System administrators responsible for handling Linux servers get confused at times when they are told to benchmark a file system's performance. But the main reason that this confusion happens is because, it does not matter whatever tool you use to test the file system's performance, what matter's is the exact requirement.File system's performance depends upon certain factors as follows.

Installing packages from rescue mode

Let me narrate one of the funniest thing that happened with me, while i was solving a dependency issue a couple of days back.

I was installing some package for my rhel5 machine, and suddenly encountered a dependency issue. As the machine was freshly installed and setup (i dint have most of the developer packages installed!).

And as most of you guys do, even i note down the dependency package name, to search it out in the internet to install manually using rpm command.(and believe me i did solve a lot of yum dependency issues just like this many number of times)

This time the package required to solve the dependency issue was "ruby"!!