For centralised authentication and authorisation, LDAP is the de-facto standard. Whether in its pure form on Unix or in Active Directory guise on Windows, everyone uses it.

What many people don't realise is that you can store all sorts of useful (and not so useful) information in LDAP. One field which can be useful is the "manager" attribute. One of our customers use that and so we've written a small script to graph it using the excellent Graphviz tool.

In this second article we'll be taking a look at the dashboard itself. Six months ago we were distinctly underwhelmed by the dashboard - it was more style than substance.

More recently we tried it and found various bugs including a lack of sort which resulted in this amusing graph:

It's been exactly six months since we wrote our first Puppet dashboard article and it seems that an update is due.

In this first article, we'll cover installing puppet dashboard on a Debian Lenny server as that is where our puppet server currently runs.

• first of all you will probably need a newer version of the rails framework - use lenny-backports for this:
  • apt-get install -t lenny-backports rails

Britain is enjoying rather nice weather at the moment. One of our consultants has a CurrentCost meter and developed a plugin for Nagios using the excellent Nagios::Plugin Perl library. This allowed him to graph home current usage like this (spot when the electric oven was turned on):

Sadly this isn't to be a blog of joy, more a blog of "must do better".

Today we upgraded one of our servers from Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) to Lucid (10.04 LTS) and we hit a few issues.

First of all, we carefully read the Release Notes, nothing of relevance there.

We then followed the Upgrade process. This went fine for a little while but then it started to fail badly - any package install failed with:
 

A relatively new term "Devops" is starting to become more widespread. As with most new terms it means different things to different people (a bit like "the cloud" or "grid computing" does even now).

Here at Bitcube we use KVM as our preferred virtualisation platform. It has the best Linux support and is the standard for all Linux distributions. Whilst it still shows a bit of immaturity at times, there is an upside - rapid development and improvements.

Wonderful though Puppet is, it can be frustrating when it spits out an error message which makes no sense.

We could keep all this useful information to ourselves, however we are a caring, sharing company and so we've spilled the beans.

Without further ado, please see our guide to Puppet errors.

Reductive Labs, who produce Puppet recently released an early version their dashboard tool. You can have a look at their brief tour as well as the code repository and documentation site which is here.

It's clearly early days both in terms of the dashboard (v0.2.1) and in terms of our experience with it. To be frank in it's current state it's a pretty tool however it lacks a large amount of functionality which would make it actually useful.

For one of our customers, we are using the fabulous Dropbox tool to perform synchronisation (in this case between a website and the client's workstation).

In order to monitor that Dropbox is running correctly we've written this Nagios plugin which we are using together with Opsview which is our preferred Nagios implementation at the moment.