Puppet is an open source systems management policy engine for Linux/Unix systems. Put simply, with puppet you create a policy for a machine (or class of machines) that describes what the machine should look like, and puppet ensures that it always is in that state. With this new way of looking at managing you systems you can quickly automate out much of the boring aspects of administration, and make it much easier to bring new systems on line to known configurations.
The talk will cover the basics of Puppet, using the example of the IBM OpenSim Grid as an implementation. The meeting should be highly interactive, and hopefully give you a new set of tools for doing systems administration.
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