The administration of a large number of servers can be quite tiresome without a central configuration management. This article gives a first introduction into the configuration management Puppet.

Introduction
In our daily work at the Open Source Support Center we maintain a large number of servers. When it comes to the management of larger clusters or larger setups this means maintaining dozens of machines with an almost identical configuration and only slight variations, if any. Without central configuration management, making small changes to the configuration would mean repeating the same step on all machines. This is where Puppet comes into play.