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I know I should move on and start a new blog but I'm keeping this my temporary home.

New project, massive overkill in website creation. I've a simple project to put up a four page website which was already somewhat over specified in being hosted on AWS and S3. This isn't quite ridiculous enough though so I am using puppet to manage an EC2 instance (it will eventually need some server side work) and making it available in multiple regions. That would almost have been enough but I'm currently working on being able to provision an instance either in AWS or Rackspace because...well...Amazon might totally go down one day! Yes, its over-the-top but I needed something simple to help me climb up the devops and cloud learning curve.

So off the bat - puppet installation. I've an older 10.04 Ubuntu virtual server which has been somewhat under-taxed so I've set that up as a puppet master. First lesson - always use the latest version from a tarball unless you have kept the OS upgraded. Getting puppet dashboard working alongside this isn't too much of a strain however it would help if everyones instructions included details to cd into the install direction to run rake and a rough note of where that directory is likely to be. I've linked Vide's post since its one of the few with the instruction to cd and on ubuntu for me its /usr/share/puppet-dashboard. Of course, it just illustrates that I am getting old since I should have realised that rake was looking for a local file because its just ruby's verion of make....doh!

Next up comes provisioning - this is why you need the latest stable version. Follow the instructions over at puppet labs on getting started with cloud provisioning...you may find that you also need to update gem from source :

( URL="http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz" PACKAGE=$(echo $URL | sed "s/\.[^\.]*$//; s/^.*\///") cd $(mktemp -d /tmp/install_rubygems.XXXXXXXXXX) && \ wget -c -t10 -T20 -q $URL && \ tar xfz $PACKAGE.tgz && \ cd $PACKAGE && \ sudo ruby setup.rb )


Sorry I cant attribute the above. So I'm about to spin up some instances....

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