(Author’s Note: This answer refers to RHEL 6 and prior versions. RHEL 7 now has a fully supported upgrade path from RHEL 6, the details of which are at the end.) To start, I should note that there are two ways to do the in-place upgrade: Drop in the installation DVD (or use the DVD … Read more
Once upon a time I had an opportunity to decide on a naming scheme. So I went round and asked my developers, who after all were the people who had to work with these names on a day-to-day basis, whether they preferred functional names (that is, names which represent, in some encoded form, the purpose … Read more
A domain-specific language makes a big difference in the amount of code you write. For example, you could argue that there’s not much difference between: chmod 640 /my/file and file { “/my/file”: mode => 640, } but there’s a great deal of difference between these: FILE=/my/file chmod 640 $FILE chown foo $FILE chgrp bar $FILE … Read more
I started using Puppet ahead of deploying a new infrastructure and simply bought a (well-regarded) book on the topic. I don’t think most people actually obtain professional Puppet training. I worked on examples until I could mold the process to my environment. This was December 2011, so within a few weeks, I was able to … Read more