How to only run apt-get update from puppet if it’s necessary. A small example on how you can make apt-get update only run if a) the machine rebooted and b) something changed in /etc/apt.

More Puppet Tips&Tricks in our new blog post: This time on Variable variables.

We’ve created a puppet package that completely installs and patches GlassFish 3.0.1 on Debian Lenny. Check it out!

Short howto on how to use Debian’s Python interpreter with GlassFish’s supplied pkg tool on a 64 bit system.

Sometimes you need to hack up some code to work around some network problems. Sometimes you’re not very proud of it, but you want to share your solution nonetheless. This is one of those ugly solutions…

Although it’s going to be easier in puppet 2.6, this helps you if you want to check if a certain value is present in a puppet array and perform actions based on that.

A relatively simple one-liner for getting long running queries out of PostgreSQL.

Puppet Tips&Tricks: How to test the regex you built for your regsubst invocation. In IRB.