Bare metal recovery, sometimes called bare metal restore, is a backup restoration method that allows sysadmins to restore a server to a previous state without having to install an operating system or certain software first. Even though the word metal is mentioned, this backup restoration method can be used on...
We've written about Puppet a couple of times before, but this time we'll cover the topic of renewing Puppet CA certificate. While the official documentation recommends regenerating the Puppet CA and re-issueing certificates for all Puppet agents, in some cases that's not neccessary nor convenient. In this post, we'll explain...
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to automate EC2 instance type change (vertical scaling) or create an EBS snapshot at specific time or time-based interval, then AWS Ops Automator might be the perfect solution for you. While the feature list of this tool isn’t impressively long,...
We haven’t had a chance to mention Bareos backup solution on our blog yet, so we’ll make amends and begin with a short intro. Bareos stands for Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced and, as the name suggests, it’s an open-source, cross-network backup solution. The project was started in 2010 as a...
HAProxy's stick tables are not a new feature. In fact, they were introduced way back in 2010, and ever since they were handy for tracking the number of open connections, HTTP request rate, bytes in/out rate, etc. In most cases, we use stick tables for throttling abusive HTTP clients, but...
Hi there. In this post, we’ll cover the introduction to Puppet acceptance testing. If you are new to Puppet, we recommend that you check out Easy Puppet module development with PDK. And if you are curious about testing Puppet modules, the Puppet unit testing for beginners post is a good...
Thanks to PDK (Puppet Development Kit), writing unit and acceptance tests for Puppet modules has never been easier. We’ve already covered the PDK basics, so if you’re not familiar with this magnificent tool, make sure to glance over the Easy Puppet module development with PDK blog post. This time, we’ll...
Recently, a client approached us with a curious Puppet Server problem that manifested in excessive CPU usage on the Puppet Server. One of the surprising things was that the issue appeared out of the blue, and was causing timeouts during Puppet runs on 650 nodes. None of the recent changes...
If you’re using Puppet and you want to automate something other than basic OS configuration, package install or Unix user account management, Puppet Forge is the first place where you want to look. With over 6500 modules, chances are that you’ll find a module or two that automate the very...
Puppet is an open-core configuration management tool that significantly simplifies infrastructure management, especially when sysadmins have to deal with a large number of servers. Essentially, with its declarative language, Puppet allows sysadmins to describe the desired system state in high-level terms - e.g. users, installed packages, enabled services, configuration files, etc. Puppet...
