This post is more of a reference for myself than anything else, however I thought it might come in handy for some others.  It’s bastardised from the install.sh which comes with nventory and will configure an Amazon Linux AMI for you.

The install script below installs nventory, rubygems and nginx from source and everything else from either the Amazon repo or Epel.

This means that you can install and configure this system on the Amazon Free Usage Tier using the “tiny” Amazon Linux ( amzn-ami-2011.09.1.x86_64-ebs ) and get a complete inventory server and puppetmaster for a year at zero cost!

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The last two posts in this series have covered what the overall system will look like and how to ensure your puppet server is ready to receive the files from the SCM repo via capistrano – This post will cover setting up the test server using JenkinsCI and creating some tests.

We start by installing Jenkins.

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I’ve been playing around with Capistrano over the past few weeks and I’ve recently created a way to use the power of Capistrano’s “deploy” and “rollback” features with Puppet and MCollective to enable me to have complete control over the deployment of my system configurations. (more…)

OK, it’s May the fourth as I’ve started to write this and I couldn’t resist the title, but I hope that this first post in what I aim to deliver as a series of tutorials will help you move towards full testing, integration and deployment of your systems and turn what could be a five hour manual build and deploy routine into a single code commit.

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OK, so a few people heard that I was playing with RabbitMQ and MCollective and hinted (less than subtly I might add!) that a blog post might be in order, so here it is.  If you want someone to blame, look no further than @patrickdebois and @garethr :)

The original issue was as follows:

1. I already use MCollective with ActiveMQ over STOMP, but the XML config format is a nightmare.
2. I want to use LogStash but that uses AMQP and ActiveMQ doesn’t support that.
3. I don’t want to have to run two message queuing servers on my network.

@ripienaar mentioned that he’d managed to get MCollective working with RabbitMQ’s new stomp plugin, and RabbitMQ is the AMQP server suggested by the logstash site.  This looked promising – could I really kill two birds with one stone?

The answer – I’m pleased to announce – is yes, I was able to kill two birds with one stone, and this is how I did it…

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I’ve just pushed a load of code to Github for a project I’ve been working on in my spare time.

The project is named after one of the developer’s ex-hamster (it had to go back to the shop for being too violent, but we’d named the project by then!) and is designed to combine Change Management, Configuration Management, Auditing and integration with tools like Puppet through a DJango-based website and API.

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