We published our internally developed puppet modules.

We, along with some customers, have our authoritative DNS setup with 1 PowerDNS master(which is unreachable over the internet), running poweradmin, and 2 BIND9 slaves(which are ns1 and ns2). This setup works great, but there is a bug in (older versions of) PowerAdmin and one in BIND that together can cause some havoc.

By default facter returns the free and total memory and swap of a machine only in GB or MB. To remedy this we rewrote the memory.rb bundled with Puppet to return the numbers in bytes.

HostHenker is a small shell script, which based on whether a daemon is running, adds an entry to /etc/hosts for this host or a fallback host.

Resetting a cryptostick is possible after all!

A couple of tips to keep in mind when running a puppetd on the puppetmaster.

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.