puppet is made by Reductive Labs and released under the GNU Public License. It is a system to manage configuration files and services. It is written in ruby.
There are several products out there that do the same job as puppet, the main competitor is Cfengine. There is also the open source version of Red Hat satellite server spacewalk. All these systems have their various benefits and pitfalls. I find puppet to be simpler to configure and very easy to extend. One possible pitfall is that it is written in Ruby, and I have almost no experience in ruby. That said, it's a very simple language to read to quite easy to follow (unlike PERL).
To configure puppet, you install the puppet-server rpm or build from source. The rpms are available for centos, RHEL (via EPEL) and Fedora. In the previous section we downloaded the puppet rpms from EPEL and installed them in our local repository.
The steps to configure puppet are
- install the puppetmaster
- create manifests
- configure clients to use the puppetmaster