A wise television character once advised to “Live every week like it’s Shark Week,” and while we appreciate the programming on the Discovery Channel, we’d rather apply this adage to System Administrator Appreciation Day. Your sysadmin works day in and day out (or you, as a sysadmin, work day in and day out), and there are little ways to show gratitude that don’t require waiting for a ThinkGeek shipment. Rounding out our contest winners, Ramin Khatibi explains the small things that can make every day a little more like SysAdmin Day.

Perfect Day

Technology can fail spectacularly, but it hardly ever surprises me. Requirements, projects, schedules, and coworkers are always surprising me.

“We promised what?”

“DNS doesn’t work like that.”

“The new environment will be up in five hours, no sooner. So… when did we decide this project was going forward?”

“Fry’s doesn’t stock SANs. At least not yet.”

The start of my perfect day is being invited to all the pertinent planning meetings. Managers that understand Ops can use just as much lead time as Dev. Dev comes out of planning and says we need to look at MySQL capacity due to the new features going into this sprint. Sales mentions uptake is flat at the moment, but the end of the month deals are going to be strong.

The middle is planning, coding, fixing, tweaking, herding, and knocking off tasks with time to test, write docs, design review, and do all the extra things that ensure quality work.

The end is knowing that no department is waiting for me to complete a task for them.

Related posts:

SysAdmin Day Approacheth: Are you Ready?

The Big Red Button: The Dream of a SysAdmin

System Administrator Appreciation Day: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

SysAdmin Day Contest Winner: Saving the Day

The day after the party is always the hardest. As you brush your teeth, you remember all of the things you accomplished the night before: the people you met, the names you have forgotten, the number of extremely large Puppet t-shirts you somehow acquired, and two or three OSL mugs you carried across town back to your hotel. Perhaps those last few things only apply if you attended the Puppet Labs OSCON party last week.

Here at Puppet, we have our own list of accomplishments, and a lot of it has to do with you.

We are proud to announce that at this party:

• 784 participants entered the building
• Around $1500 of spirit, 3 kegs of beer, 40 lbs of ice, and 2000 sandwiches were consumed
• Thousands of memorable conversations took place—there is an old Chinese proverb that is roughly translated to this: a single conversation across the table with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books.

We had a party at Puppet Labs because we hold individuals like you in high regard—individuals who value curiosity, self-motivation, and adaptability. By hosting networking parties like the one you attended, we expose ourselves to a wealth of knowledge and inspiration. So thank you, for attending, socializing, drinking, and having a blast.

With that said, I am going to bluntly state that if you have the above-mentioned values and have a passion for what Puppet is all about, come work for us. We’ll have a grand time.

Moreover, attend PuppetConf in September so that we can keep having these conversations.

Lastly, thank you to OSUOSL (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) for their donation to the party. For more information or to donate, please visit their website.

Keep in touch, and see you soon.

(Our Pro Services Engineer Gary Larizza took the photo above and many more of the night; check them out!)

Reason #7959 to thank you sysadmin: Finding and implementing solutions at 1 am on New Year’s Day. Bejoy Mathews tells the tale:

SysAdmin to the Rescue

I’ll tell you a story which saved one of my old organizations a great deal of data loss. This was on a New Year’s Eve. I handled support for PeopleSoft on RedHat Linux—OS/Web/App. Though DB was on Oracle, I supported the OS part. The main database administrator did not backup for a week, and the data was crucial for the whole organization’s daily basic requirements—especially HR. The storage device cracked one of the hard disk drives some time earlier, and since that was not monitored properly we did not put the proper HDD in in time. One more HDD of the three went down and the database crashed. This was a huge question mark for the team of sysadmins and database admins. Many did not turn up due to fear of losing their jobs. The storage company told us the only way to correct this was to format the whole data on the storage. We all were really worried—we had already crossed the Dec 31st 11:59pm line, and it was January 1st, sitting in the Data Centre at 1-2 am in the morning. Even though the storage company advised us to format, we thought of using one of their own web-based utilities to see if we could recover. That worked really well—we were able to do something that even the storage owners couldn’t guide us to. I did not have to format it. And once the storage was back on line, I was able to retrieve data through Dec 30th at least, with only one day of lost data. That brought smiles to everyone and brought many out of their hiding places. Sysadmin skilled experience was a real help, when all seemed lost! Servers/Apps/DBs all had their respective halos on. It was truly a Happy New Year for me at least!

Check back later this week for the last of our sysadmin stories.

Related posts:

SysAdmin Day Approacheth: Are you Ready?

The Big Red Button: The Dream of a SysAdmin

System Administrator Appreciation Day: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

We literally couldn’t do this without you—all of you, doing your sysadmin thing. We had a wide variety of submissions, and we’re pleased to present three prime, premium sysadmin stories over the next week. By chance, these tales fit into distinct categories—the “average” day, saving everything in the 11th hour, and the platonic form of the workday. These stories provide a spectrum of the sysadmin experience. To start things off, we have David T. Klein’s story of daily sysadmin life:

A Day in the Life

It’s amazing how many directions one can run in, and still make progress. I would not say that this is an ordinary day, as that would suggest that things are ever consistent or ordinary, but it illustrates some of what kept me busy on one day during this past week. Between designing the architecture for our new DNS/DHCP environment, supporting our disaster recovery testing, modifying a performance analysis console for our CPE environment that I built over a caffeine-fueled weekend and building a health monitoring dashboard for our incumbent and incoming DNS infrastructure, I somehow found the time to work with our college intern to make sure that he is learning and having fun (while prodding and ribbing him to reach higher and go further), and started reading up on an interesting automation facility to help make our network environment more self-healing.

We’d like to send a hearty “Thank You!” to all who contributed, and all sysadmins. Your work is invaluable and we really do appreciate you.

Related posts:

SysAdmin Day Approacheth: Are you Ready?

The Big Red Button: The Dream of a SysAdmin

The Puppet Labs office is buzzing with excitement over our new favorite holiday: July 29th (annually, the last Friday in July) is System Administrator Appreciation Day! We’re pumped to celebrate the brave, creative, and determined souls who keep the proverbial server lights on.

To celebrate, we’re holding a contest for the best “Day in the Life of a SysAdmin” stories. In your own words (350 or less), tell us about your ideal day as a sysadmin. Why do you do it? Why do you love it? What’s your iconic, everything-was-burning-and-I-saved-it tale—and what constitues a “normal” day? Our super-secret panel of reviewers will select a handful of the best stories, and the winners will receive Puppet Labs t-shirts, Pro Puppet books, and fame and glory by having their tales published on our blog.

Also, if you have a lovely, data-saving sysadmin you want to thank, we’re taking nominations (relieving you from that stressful SysAdmin’s Eve shopping trip). Tell us a tale about that time they put out all the fires, tell us how they keep things running daily. In short, tell us why your SysAdmin is so important.

So take a break right now and send your story to sysadminday@puppetlabs.com. All submissions due no later than midnight Wednesday July 27th. We’ll notify the winners by email and publish their stories starting Friday July 29th, when we and the rest of the world give SysAdmins a big, enthusiastic “Thank you!”

For more information on System Administrator Appreciation Day, check out sysadminday.com.

Puppet 2.7.0 is available. This is a feature-based release for the Puppet project. This release incorporates several key new features, hundreds of bug fixes and enhancements, and a lot of input from the community. We went through four release candidates on Puppet 2.7.0 and appreciate all the feedback, bugs, questions and ideas that made Puppet 2.7.0.

First things first: You can download Puppet 2.7.0.

The release notes cover thoroughly what’s new, what’s changed and what’s improved with Puppet. I’ll highlight some of my favorite features, coming from a system management prospective. We’ve had a few blog articles already about some of the API enhancements, including Faces.

License Change

As previously mentioned, in 2.7.0 we changed the license of Puppet to the Apache Software License Version 2.0.

Ruby 1.9 Support

2.7.0 is the first version of Puppet to support Ruby 1.9. We’ve targeted 1.9.2 and higher versions. There are still a few known issues, but bugs are being aggresively fixed with Ruby 1.9 and it’s now a first-class citizen on our Continuous Integration system.

Deterministic Catalog Application

Previously, Puppet didn’t guarantee the application of a catalog of unrelated resources in any particular order. This meant that if you forgot to specify some important `before` or `require` relationship, a single catalog might work fine on eight nodes and then fail mysteriously on the ninth and tenth. This could be frustrating! Now it’s gone: Puppet will make sure that the same catalog will always be applied in the same order on every machine, and it’ll either succeed reliably or fail reliably. (This change will also be appearing in the final 2.6.x releases.)

Manage Network Devices

Puppet has new types for managing network hardware, and a new `puppet device` subcommand for applying these configurations. These are in their early stages and can currently only handle Cisco IOS-based hardware, but they’re the start of a big leap forward in Puppet’s ability to manage your entire infrastructure. Look a blog with more details of this functionality soon.

Deprecations

We’re starting the hourglass on a few older features:

• ‘puppet‘ as a synonym for ‘puppet apply‘ — Starting today, running `puppet my-manifest.pp` will issue a warning; you should start using `puppet apply` directly instead. Support for implicit invocation of puppet apply will be dropped in Puppet 2.8.
• Dynamic scope — We’ve started issuing warnings when variables or resource defaults are found via dynamic lookup. There’s more info and explanation in a guide on the docs site, but the short version is that you should start referencing variables with their qualified names instead of counting on dynamic scope. We hope to drop support for dynamic scope in Puppet 2.8.
• No more `–parseonly` option — This one’s already gone, because we used Faces to build a drop-in replacement: use `puppet parser validate [] [ ...]` instead.

Download Puppet 2.7.0

PuppetConf is a DevOps & Operations conference that provides practical information with immediate takeaway. The conference offers two days of talks, tutorials, demos, panels, and birds of a feather sessions. Our speakers hail from large enterprises, medium-sized companies, and start-ups and are the acknowledged experts and pundits in the field.

PuppetConf features four tracks. Our DevOps track headlines the conference with speakers hailing from Facebook, DTO Solutions, Dell, and more. Our Cloud Computing track brings together talks from Cloud Providers and managers of large Cloud infrastructures. Our Puppet 101 & 201 features users and our community showcasing a comprehensive series of step by step talks ranging from getting started with Puppet to using its most advanced features. Importantly, the Portland Center for Performing Arts was selected for its open spaces and quiet corners facilitating a strong hallway track.

PuppetConf also features a range of social and networking opportunities from parties, dinners, and tours of Portland landmarks, often involving beer. If you’re learning, hacking, recruiting, or just networking then PuppetConf is not to be missed.

Registration is now open and limited to 500 participants. The first 50 to register will receive a copy of Pro Puppet.

Going to Velocity? Check out Jeff McCune‘s talk, “Asynchronous Real-time Monitoring with MCollective.” If you’re looking to:

• Get an introduction to MCollective
• Understand why asynchronous communication is important when monitoring
• Discover the benefits of addressing machines by meta-data
• Learn how to write a monitoring agent for MCollective in Ruby
• Understand how to remediate performance issues with MCollective and Puppet

then this is the talk to attend. 1:00 on Wednesday in the Mission City room. Jeff wrote the MCollective chapter in Pro Puppet, so you know he knows what he’s talking about.

In unrelated opportunities, we want to buy you a drink! Come join Puppet Labs, Wednesday 6/15 in the San Jose room at TechMart, right next door to the Santa Clara Convention Center from 4:00 until we run out of free beer and food (probably around 9). A bunch of our staff just happens to be in town for a work function and we’d love to buy you a couple of beers.


View Puppet Labs at Techmart in a larger map

For about three years now (since basically 15 minutes after Pulling Strings with Puppet was released) James has been asked, “When is the 2nd edition coming out?” This is quickly followed by, “Why is the book so short?” And then the question one never gets sick of: “Why isn’t there an index?”

Well y’all can stop asking—Pro Puppet is here and shipping. This edition is a complete rewrite and extension of the original book. It covers the 2.6.x series of releases and covers a lot more ground than the heavily space-limited Pulling Strings book.

The book includes quite a bit of material. The first two chapters re-introduce the reader to Puppet and provide step-by-step instructions to get a Puppet Master and Agent up and managing some resources. Puppet modules and organizing your code are also covered in these two chapters to help you get things nice and organized from the beginning. Since James is a fairly organized and sane person (and doesn’t separate out his right and left socks within pairs like Jeff does), he wrote these chapters with just the right attention to detail. Chapter 3 builds upon the organizational structure James introduces in the form of modules by covering Puppet environments. The chapter is actually more of a description of a typical dev/test/prod change management workflow with version control underlying the whole process. In Chapter 4, Jeff tackles scalability with Puppet by replacing the out-of-box Puppet Master with a full blown SSL load balancer enabling horizontal scaling by adding as many Puppet Masters as you’d like. If you’re interested in encryption, HTTP load balancing, and scalability then this chapter is definitely for you.

Following the scalability chapter, the rest of the book covers a number of different features of Puppet added since Pulling Strings. First, external node classification, which is really just a fancy term for “pulling in data from anywhere you want” is covered in a great chapter written by James. Next, Jeff covers the ability to exchange resources between Puppet managed nodes in the chapter about how to export resources from one node and collect them on another. If you’ve ever been annoyed by SSH host key warning messages or prompts, read this section. You should never again have to press “enter” before connecting to a host for the first time. Think of the time you’ll save!

Finally, a number of tools external to the core Puppet project are covered in the rest of the book. We cover how to setup and connect the Puppet Dashboard, providing a nice web interface to Puppet and the reports produced by Puppet runs. Other tools covered are the Puppet Forge and Puppet module tool, reports and custom report processors, Cucumber Puppet and the Ruby DSL. One tool in particular, MCollective, works incredibly well in combination with Puppet. It works so well, in fact, that an entire chapter has been dedicated to the subject of integrating MCollective for use with Puppet. If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Boy, I really wish I could make this change to all of those systems _right now_ but I hate having to know their hostnames to SSH into them,” then MCollective is something you should definitely check out in Chapter 11.

So why did it take so long? Well life, mostly, and waiting for the right release to base the book on. Thankfully this book was a collaboration with the awesome Jeff McCune, who unlike the book’s other author, James Turnbull, isn’t a shocking procrastinator. It was largely due to Jeff coming on board and writing half the book that the book got done at all.

Preview

We are happy to announce the second release candidate for Puppet 2.7.0.

This moves us firmly toward a final release of the 2.7.0 series, including 38 maintenance changes to improve the robustness of the software, and 85 distinct bug fixes resolving issues found with the RC or the new features included.

Notably, we have added a large set of improvements to the pkgutil package provider, resolving #4528, and making it better, faster, stronger, and harder working.

We have updated the default ACL on the puppet master, allowing nodes to request information about themselves from the configured node terminus. This exposes data from the ENC, as well as any static node configuration, to the same node; by default you still cannot query information across nodes without changing the ACL rules. This allows interesting changes, including the ability to inspect the ENC data from the client when using the new Faces-based agent.

Finally, we have made substantial usability improvements to the Faces; this fills out the set of plumbing features we expected to make available to Face authors in the initial release, resolves a swath of bugs found during testing, and adds documentation to all Faces and actions accessible through the puppet help subcommand.

Run puppet help to get started with the new help system; it includes all the details you need to explore the available subcommands and actions.

We hope that this is the final step in delivering a functional and capable Puppet 2.7.0 to the community. The second release candidate for Puppet 2.7.0 can be downloaded here.