By default, instances created on Amazon EC2 will have a randomly assigned IPv4 address, which is why we’ve written a script to automatically create DNS entries in PowerDNS for instances managed through EC2.

We published our internally developed puppet modules.

In order to make use of Amazon EC2 to its full potential, it is important that we can quickly spawn Debian installations that are automatically configured using Puppet. We accomplish this by creating our own Kumina-branded Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

Quick fix for the squeeze-backport expired Release file, if you use your own apt proxy.

An explanation on how we build our modules. Fairly high level.

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.

Kumina is happy to announce it’s in the process of switching all its managed servers from Debian Linux to Microsoft Windows. Due to high demand, it was decided last January that this would be a good time to switch from Linux to Windows.

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.