I was hoping to have some notes from my puppet enterprise experience by now. But the process has been a bit frustrating. I’ve been running open source puppet since 0.24, and decided to give puppet enterprise a whirl, I quickly ran into some issues getting puppet enterprise up and running on my network. Today I recieved the following email:

We’ve found an issue in Puppet Enterprise 2.8.0 that keeps live management from functioning and prevents MCollective from using filters.

We have prepared a partial upgrade package that fully resolves this issue. If you have installed 2.8.0, you candownload the package fix here.

We have also temporarily pulled PE 2.8.0 from ourdownload page, and plan to release a fixed PE 2.8.1 sometime next week. We will notify you about the availability of PE 2.8.1 when it is released.

I’m not sure this explains all the issues I’ve had with puppet enterprise, but I’m putting this project on hiatus until they release 2.8.1

My 12 months on Amazon’s free tier has expired so I decided to build a small VM implementation at home. The free tier is great for getting familiar with the Amazon offering, but if you want more than one node, or anything resembling a fast vm, it’s the wrong choice. 

I settled on CentOS + KVM as it works out of the box, and it’s the distro I prefer these days. I’ve set up a half dozen guests for various projects, and I’m already annoyed with the challenges of keeping these nodes in sync. 

This is where Puppet Enterprise comes in. I use puppet open source quite a bit at work, we’ve been looking at the enterprise edition ever since they launched it at puppet conf a few years back, but we haven’t pulled the trigger on a purchase.

Puppet Enterprise has a 10 node test drive license, available here: http://info.puppetlabs.com/download-pe.html. Sounds just about perfect for my little home lab, so at the end of the day I may wind up with a more robust puppet implementation at home then at work. 

So far, the first two java applications I’ve installed have been unhappy with CentOS’s default java installation. 

After spending a few moments trying to fire up Jenkins, a quick trip to the support forum listed quite a few complaints, and one quick fix: Remove GCJ

Same issue with my Hadoop installation. Please use the Sun JDK. Why in the heck are the RedHat folks pushing this JVM? Hadoop was kind enough to turn me on to a more elegant solution: 

# alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 3
# alternatives --config java