This post explores the Puppet topics of Classes, Roles and Profiles as well as how to utilise Puppet Template files. The class keyword is a key Puppet building block. There are various different ways to utilise the class keyword and these are explored below.
This blog post explores the topic of Puppet Modules for packaging and sharing code. It also looks at how you can use Puppet’s public module repository Forge to find existing modules and how you can use the r10k module management tool to update, manage and maintain them on your machines.
This post is a continuation of my earlier Getting Started with Puppet on Windows post (although most of the information in this post is OS agnostic). This post explores how you can make your Puppet manifests more dynamic via the typical programming constructs of variables, expressions, conditions and iteration. It also covers Puppet’s Facter tool (for simplifying the interrogation of system info) and Hiera mechanism (for separating configuration data from your code).
This blog post describes some initial steps you can take to learn Puppet, particularly to control Windows machines. I’m currently learning Puppet via the Puppet 5 Beginners Guide (Third Edition) book by John Arundel.
This post contains a PowerShell tool-making scorecard: a series of short questions to assess whether your custom cmdlet/function/tool is following some (generally considered) best practice design choices.
PowerShell now comes in two flavours, (Vanilla) Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core (..Rocky Road? ice cream flavour TBD). PowerShell Core is a version of PowerShell built on top of .NET Core. The GA version of PowerShell Core is due to be released on the 10th January and Release Candidate versions have been available for some time.
I recently resolved an issue with our Isilon storage cluster that was causing file writes to be interrupted and fail. While diagnosing the issue I discovered that (intriguingly) the disruption was occurring at (almost) exact 10 minute intervals. Any in progress write operation occurring at that interval would fail.
I was recently tasked with investigating how we could store the configuration of our SQL Server Reporting Services report subscriptions in a source control and then automate the process of (later) configuring them in one or more new SSRS servers.
