I've been setting up puppet for over a month now and I have yet to take advantage of all of the features. This is likely not truly a short-coming of puppet, but rather an issue with my vision of what puppet should be.
I decided that I would use puppet for server configuration management without any experience and having done what in retrospect seems like only a cursory level of research into the potential solutions for this. Clearly the best tools available are puppet and CFEngine and I found the complaints about the CFEngine development process too overwhelming to ignore.
After choosing and implementing a system, reading the definitive guide, Pulling strings with Puppet , and deciding to use it a manner it was not designed for, I've decided that it just plain sucks.
My complaint revolves around 2 issues. First is that what I want is tool to make "bare-metal" restores from a base image easy. This is not what puppet is designed for. The second and although more pressing issue is that the default types do not always do as expected.
First, there's just no good tool for this. It works OK for this really. Better than you'd expect at any rate.
Faulty types. The File type when you use ensure => true doesn't create a file or maybe it does...I don't remember, but when you do that with a directory(note there is no directory type) it fails. You must create and Exec, which I have begun to realize is the default type to get anything done, in order to create a directory.
And the types the suck. Here they are:
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/TypeReference
I decided that I would use puppet for server configuration management without any experience and having done what in retrospect seems like only a cursory level of research into the potential solutions for this. Clearly the best tools available are puppet and CFEngine and I found the complaints about the CFEngine development process too overwhelming to ignore.
After choosing and implementing a system, reading the definitive guide, Pulling strings with Puppet , and deciding to use it a manner it was not designed for, I've decided that it just plain sucks.
My complaint revolves around 2 issues. First is that what I want is tool to make "bare-metal" restores from a base image easy. This is not what puppet is designed for. The second and although more pressing issue is that the default types do not always do as expected.
First, there's just no good tool for this. It works OK for this really. Better than you'd expect at any rate.
Faulty types. The File type when you use ensure => true doesn't create a file or maybe it does...I don't remember, but when you do that with a directory(note there is no directory type) it fails. You must create and Exec, which I have begun to realize is the default type to get anything done, in order to create a directory.
And the types the suck. Here they are:
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/TypeReference
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