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.

itunes11 and ebook pdfs

So, Apple in their (in)finite wisdom made a few changes in itunes 11. Among them, something to do with pdf/ebooks and the book library.

It seems you can no longer add purchased ebooks ( at least, not sure how far down this goes ) to your library. The change occurred in the crap-tastic itunes 11.

The best part is the recommended solution: Go download/install the Kindle iOS application and use its doc sync features to sync up the pdfs.

WHAT?!

The other odd part is that the pdf/ebooks ( from the same vendor, Manning ) which were already in my library are fine - still there and still able to read them/sync to iphone/ipad.

Apple, why have your software products taking a nose dive these last few months? Wake up!

I think Apple may be telling us to not only use other people's software but maybe even switch to their hardware?

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.

I can haz pi!

Well, got my raspberry pi this afternoon. Thankfully, I ordered it before the hurricane hit!

So far, I've almost managed to fry it - off by a pin or two oops!

Oct 30 14:44:31 foo kernel[0]: USB Notification:  The device "XHCI Root Hub USB 2.0 Simulation" @ 0x14000000 has caused an overcurrent condition.  The hub it is attached to has been disabled

Thankfully, apple put in a safeguard to prevent mishaps like that from frying your stuff - at least I hope. I need to check the pi board, now if I can just get the tx/rx of the console cable going :->

Thought on technical documentation

Had an interesting IM exchange with a co-worker:

me: Where is the documentation describing how to get the uid of a server?
co-worker:
co-worker: I emailed it to you
me: Just a thought but email does not count as documentation. Does this exist anywhere in a doc or maybe as a puppet fact?

My co-worker has yet to respond and its been about 15 minutes.

This does raise a very interesting issue. Documentation is very important and it should be in a common location. To me, email just is not documentation - its a heads-up but not documentation.

Am I crazy that I don't like email? In fact, I actually hate it. Its a "necessary evil" but that does not mean someone can send me something and expect that I have added it to my ubermind and will hoard that data away somewhere for eternity including instant recall.

Especially when the way to find out is so freaking simple it should be made in to a puppet fact and culled in to puppet's inventory service ( http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/inventory_service.html and/or http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/spec_q_facts.html )

ipmitool -H ipmi_host -U ipmi_user -P ipmi_pass fru | grep 'Board Serial' | awk '{print $4}'
ABC123FGYM

( obviously, those are changed values - use your imagination :-> )