Archive | mcollective

28 April 2012 ~ Comments Off

Trigger Puppet runs though Git hooks

Since shutting down my business I now run a small 25 node network with no Puppet Masters and I do not schedule regular Puppet runs – I run them just when needed. Till now I’ve just done puppet runs via MCollective, basically I’d edit some puppet files and after comitting them just send off a [...]

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23 March 2012 ~ Comments Off

FlossUK and Puppetcamp Edinburgh

I’ve just finished presenting my talk on how I currently work on Puppet modules at Puppetcamp here in Edinburgh where I’ve been for the week talking on both FlossUK 2012 and Puppetcamp.
7 tools for your devops stack
View more presentations from Kri…

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26 July 2011 ~ Comments Off

Trigger your chef runs with mcollective

Mcollective has been able to fire up puppetd runs for a while now, via a standalone RPC call or through the puppet commander binary (check it out, spread your load). I wanted to be able to fire up my chef clients with mcollective, to use metadata to filter what should be impacted. So I [...]

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15 March 2011 ~ Comments Off

Mcollective agent, to manage agents

It started like a toy, to learn a little more about mcollective agents but I finally turned into something useful (at least for me). I pushed my agent “smith” on my github account. It allows you to install or remove agents within mcollective. I usually use my configuration management tool to deploy such pieces of [...]

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11 March 2011 ~ Comments Off

Generic use of chef providers in mcollective

This post follows my previous one, dealing with the reuse of chef providers of chef in mcollective. In the comments Adam Jacob had an interesting word and when I wrote my second agent, to manage package I saw it would be a piece of cake to write a really generic agent, due to the nature [...]

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09 March 2011 ~ Comments Off

Debugging MCollective Agents

While developing agents for The Marionette Collective it’s often quite difficult to debug weird behavior in agents, I wrote a debugger that makes development easier. Agents tend to run in a thread inside a daemon connected through middleware, this all makes it really hard. The debugger is a harness that runs an agent standalone allowing [...]

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08 March 2011 ~ Comments Off

Reusing chef providers in mcollective

It has been quite calm for a couple of months here. I have switched job, it explains why I had less time to post some things.I now work at fotolia, and I switched from puppet to chef (no troll intended, I still think puppet is a great tool, please read this).
However, a tool I still [...]

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05 March 2011 ~ Comments Off

Using MCollective 1.1.3 Subcollectives for Security

We’ll be releasing The Marionette Collective version 1.1.3 on Monday which will bring with it a major new feature called Subcollectives. This feature lets you partition your collective into multiple isolated broadcast zones much like a VLAN does to a traditional network. Each node can belong to one or many collectives at the same time. [...]

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26 February 2011 ~ Comments Off

MCollective 1.0.1 demo using AWS CloudFormation

Amazon is keeping things ticking along nicely by constantly adding features to their offerings. I’m almost more impressed at the pace and diversity of innovation than the final solution. During the week they announced AWS CloudFormation. Rather than add to the already unbearable tedium of “it’s not a Chef or Puppet killer” blog posts I [...]

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06 January 2011 ~ Comments Off

Testing MCollective Agents In Development

When developing plugins for MCollective testing can be a pain since true testing would mean you need a lot of virtual machines and so forth. I wrote something called the MCollective Collective Builder that assist in starting up a Stomp server and any number of mcollectived processes on one machine which would let you develop [...]

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