puppet on the pi

Well, a follow-up of sorts on the raspberry pi and puppet posting from a while back

Thought I would post the code up on my github account, https://github.com/bilsch.

Tried rebuilding from a fresh image. Other than burning a lot of cpu time on puppet installation itself ( think I have a fix for this one, don't generate rdoc/ri ) the fresh install to a running pi where I essentially want it. Everything worked fine except for the fimware/boot rom update which is just another git clone/copy.

Raspberry pi puppet

So, I decided I really wanted to have an easy way to get my raspberry pi images to a somewhat sane state but I did not really want to write shell scripts to do this.

I've been using puppet at work for over a year now and its pretty simple really - most of the time I spend on puppet configs is debugging various isms ( like, for an ssh authorized keys manipulation, you can't throw an array to user :-< )

Planning to test out my image process soon-ish. Still need to get mcollective working properly - think its about the last module still erroring out on me.

So far, I have:

1. ssh configuration
2. various package installations
• rasp-config, ruby-shadow, python-pip, ruby-dev
• ruby packages: builder ( for gem installs ), wiringpi
• pip ( python ) package rpi.gpio
3. rsync backup, just a simple backup to my fileserver
4. /boot/config.txt so I can preserve any modifications I may want
5. locales config
6. user maint, putting my ssh key in place, forcing pi's password to be maintained/not raspberry
7. automate git clone of remote repos
   ( So I don't have to remember to do those by hand though updates/pull will be manual )

Only down side is that I'll still need a bootstrap script to put a few packages on the box - puppet/facter gems and puppet.conf, then I should just need to run puppet agent and everything should magically appear

I may upload the puppet configs to github but most of the configurations are going to be local

puppetlabs dist for arm

W: Failed to fetch http://apt.puppetlabs.com/dists/precise/Release  Unable to find expected entry 'main/binary-armhf/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)

Bummer! I guess I can't use the puppet dist from puppet labs directly :-< May be worth the time to compile/install manually but for now - meh :->

Raspberry Pi 512m model ram

So this is interesting, by default ( at least with AdaFruit's occidentalis 0.2, http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-2 ) I was only seeing the first 256m of the ram.

Looking at the documentation http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt it looks like a simple modification to /boot/config.txt addressed the issue:

gpu_mem_512=8

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           486         56        429          0          9         28
-/+ buffers/cache:         18        467
Swap:           99          0         99

It looks like the kernel actually took 16 meg instead of 8 like I wanted but I'll take it :-> I'm logging in only via ssh so I don't see a reason to waste memory on video output.

Heresy!

I started my 'career' about 10 years ago. Just out of high school, was playing around with this thing called unix. This odd thing called Exploring - post369 to be exact. I was about to head out on a trip when one of the organizers tells me: We need to talk at some point on this trip - I think I have a job for you.

That talk consisted of seeing if I was interested in cleaning up ( eg, I was wearing cut-off jean shorts and wore gritty combat boots :-> ) - to which I said sure. Turns out, that internship turned into a pretty wild ride. Got into Solaris administration which turned into Linux administration which also included learning lots about networking, the ( evil ) hacks you can do with a linux box acting as a router/switch/bridge and many other things. I have pretty much always been a unix geek - well, except for that very! short period I liked windows. C'mon, had to run games somehow. Long live StarCraft!

The last ~6 years or so I've been a big linux geek. I ran mostly RedHat/Fedora for quite a while. About 4 years ago a co-worker said we should switch to CentOS and thus began my permanent switch from Fedora to CentOS.

( Had to look it up :-> ) MacOSX came out back in 2001 and had captured my attention. I had owned a NeXT for a short while - and I liked the interface. I was really bummed it did not work out for them. The hardware was pretty good for the time and the OS had a pretty interesting look/feel to it. The first thing I thought when I saw some of the presentations on OSX was - heh, thats cute, they resurrected NextSTEP! From there I was quite interested in seeing just how well the OS would do given the past attempts.

Thanks to a really neat contract assignment, I had the opportunity to pick up a Mac G4 tower for free as they were refreshing their hardware. I picked up a nice new hard drive and a copy of OSX 10.4 ( Thanks to an un-named store for forgetting to scan the bar-code :->, that was a freebie too! ). I sat down with it, played and found that I pretty much liked the OS. There were a few things missing imho:

1. Virtual Desktops ( Spaces in OSX 10.5 )
   
2. Better game support
   
3. Less expensive hardware
   
4. The ability to run some other me-isms ( virtual machines, run a few X-based apps and automate some things which I had not yet had a chance to figure out )
   

With 10.5 and the decision to run to an X86-based platform, in addition VMWare Fusion - most of my complaints have been answered. I went ahead and, for the first time in quite a while, bought software :-> I picked up VMWare Fusion and a copy of Aperture for my photos. Aperture is neat though I still need to learn some of the touchup features - just a time thing really.

VMWare fusion is missing a few things imho:

1. On start, auto load some of my vms for me in the background ( ala VMWare Server )
   
2. The ability to have my linux guest work under Unity ( which is just cool! )
   

I have a few minor complaints about OSX 10.5, though they are reasonably minor:

1. I really like the ability to have a window follow me when I change spaces. EG, if I have an Adium window up on space 2 and switch to space 3 it should stick with me
   
2. If I click on the finder icon I want it to make a new one - not take me to another one!
   
3. If I click on the terminal app in the launcher, I want it to start a new one!
   
4. If I start an X application, I would like to have a Documents-style pop-up with all of my X applications/windows to choose from
   
5. I would like to have a config option for power management such that when I close the lid and I have the power adapter plugged in - don't sleep the laptop!
   

A few handy links for apple-related things I use so far:

1. Adium
   
2. QuickSilver
   
3. Warp
   
4. Fink
   
5. MacVim
   
6. ... probably a lot of others, those are just off the top of my head ( eg, the ones I use most )
   

All in all, my experience with OSX as an operating system has been pretty good. The UI is pretty much functional to me. I can get most of my work done with little effort. Having VMWare helps, but I do use Terminal a lot. Having QuickSilver really makes it nice for getting around. It checks things like /Applications/foo if I hit ctrl+space and type foo ( or fo even - it looks for matches in various places ). I think apple may want to consider something like QuickSilver as a new feature and integrate that one!

I have found its nfs support to be ... meh :-> Its got issues, but so does the linux nfs implementation. The changes they made for autofs make automount config pretty much a snap. I have had issues with nfs-related hangs ( sleep the laptop and go off-network, it pretty much hung the laptop until I powered it off and rebooted... not good imho :-> )

I have managed to crash OSX a few times which is kind of frustrating. Operating systems do crash from time to time and that is nothing I would go screaming it sucks! but I would like to think there are ways around the gui crashing - eg, switch virtual terminals and kill the display manager. They may be a way to do it - I just have not found it :->

All in all - well, the fiance's mac book is in the plans. She used to have a mac and she really liked it. I've have to fend her away and kick her upstairs ( I know, I'm so nice :-> ). I dig it - at least for my user interface, I'm staying on OSX. The back-end for the house is still linux :-> And probably always will be.