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• first of all you will probably need a newer version of the rails framework - use lenny-backports for this: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

Puppet is a wonderful system automation tool, however the learning curve can be a little steep. We've collected some of the errors messages and "strange" behaviour you may come across together with explanations to help overcome these hurdles and boost adoption of this fabulous tool.

If you have any useful errors and explanations, please do send them in and we'll update this article.

General Puppet errors

These errors happen on current or popular versions of Puppet.

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.

One of our puppet rules ensures that NTP (which ensures that the server has the correct time) is not installed on any virtualised guest images where the time is supposed to be taken from the host automatically. Unfortunately "facter" which should provide this information still hasn't applied patches submitted over 6 months ago. So we've rolled our own package instead for use on Debian Lenny.

It's been two years since we started using puppet in a production environment and it's worth taking a step back to see the big picture.

What's worked well? Firstly puppet is still around and very active. Reductive Labs (who develop puppet) just closed their first funding round. Old setups from two years ago still work just as they always have done.

We use many tools here at bitcube, however one has made a bigger impression than any other and we believe it gives us the edge over other companies. That tool is Puppet.

Puppet allows us to set up "recipes" on a central "puppetmaster" machine. All the servers we look after use then use these recipes to ensure they are set up correctly.