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

Puppet is a cool tool that can help companies of all sizes manage there systems quickly, easily and with a really high ROI. The setup is so easy that it can be done in less time than it takes to setup a single server by hand. Check out this review of the product.

There is an interview with the Puppet Master at Puppet labs over on the our site. We discussed the recently released Puppet Enterprise, How Luke runs Puppet Labs, Why he choose Ruby, and more. It's about 50 minutes in length.

As a system administrator, one often have to do repetitive tasks such as checking for free disk space, check mail queues and monitor critical services. If there are only a handful of servers, this task may not be very intimidating, but there are many times when there are many servers to monitor, or just for the sake of automation. This is where Nagios comes in.

As an administrator you may be face with the task of constantly monitoring web servers, mail servers, ftp servers, etc. Basically, your organization wants all of their servers up and running all of the time. Nagios 3 offers an easy set up and configuration to make this happen so that you can monitor multiple servers and have Nagios alert you to problems.

This guide explains how you can migrate mailboxes between IMAP servers with IMAP TOOLS. IMAP TOOLS is a collection of Perl scripts that allow you to do various tasks with IMAP servers and also POP3 servers. In this article I will focus on the scripts imapcopy.pl (copies messages and mailboxes from one IMAP server to another) and pop3toimap.pl (copies POP3 messages to an IMAP server).

The Puppet project allows you to issue system administration commands to one or more machines, and will smooth over the differences between distributions for you. For example, if you want to install MySQL, that action should be your primary aim, and you shouldn't have to worry about if the machine is running Maemo, Ubuntu, or Fedora.

Ansible is a tool to manage systems and their configuration. Without the need for a client installed agent and with the ability to launch programs with command line, it seems to fit between classic configuration management like Puppet on one hand and ssh/dsh on the other.

I wreck servers on a regular basis. Yep, I build and wreck multiple servers every day. As a Linux trainer I am always demonstrating how to build Linux servers in class and then blowing them away. Did it today, built an Ubuntu 10.04 server with Postfix and added the UFW firewall settings, mutt, changed the DNS to get mail going and even, made an image of that server and blew it all away.