How do I install a puppetmaster?

Question

I have a fairly large network, and I need to use some sort of configuration management tool to manage it. I've decided that Puppet Open Source meets my needs. How do I install it?

Answer 1

Do note: This should work (and has been tested on) Ubuntu 10.04 and 12.04.

Boot the server, and then change the hostname to

puppet

To do that, run sudoedit /etc/hosts and then change the $hostname (not localhost) entry to puppet.

Then, run sudoedit /etc/hostname and delete that line, and then add puppet to it.

Now, reboot the server.

To properly set up puppet, you need to be the root user. So become root by running:

sudo -i

and then entering your password when asked.

Now, we're going to use the official Puppet repo, since it has newer versions of most of it.

To do that, head over to http://apt.puppetlabs.com/, and copy the link for your version of Ubuntu. I'm using 12.04, so I'll use the puppetlabs-release-precise.deb file.

wget http://apt.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs-release-precise.deb
dpkg -i puppetlabs-release-precise.deb

Now we have the puppet repository added.

apt-get update 

Now we have updated our sources.list, so apt-get knows where to find the puppetmaster package.

apt-get install puppetmaster

Now, you're ready go and pull the strings!