After having finished implementing Puppet on our network to simplify management and deployment, I started wondering...

Puppet allows you to set up a series of recipes designed for application deployment on your network. Once you have a batch of recipes, you simply assign those to specific hosts and puppet will do the hard work of making sure everything is installed and configured per your scripts. It takes a bit more work on the frontend but it adds the comfort that you have better documentation, you can easily use version management to archive how all of your machines have been configured, and it makes deploying similar setups or disaster recovery a breeze.

So I started wondering - how long until some vendor sells a Linux "network in a box" for small businesses? I'm thinking a small "cube" computer with Linux preinstalled that has PXE boot, preconfigured LDAP, a nice interface for adding machine accounts and a series of prefab puppet scripts.

Throw a little gem like that online, tell it the names you're going to use for various computers on the network, specify what services each of those computers will run (i.e. LAMP, LDAP Replication, Postfix, Desktop, etc.) and then PXE boot + install workstations and servers automatically.

If you're managing a network of more than say 10 computers, keeping them all updated, secured and managed properly is a big challenge. The more computers you get - both servers and desktops - the worse it gets.

Until recently, Windows really held the market in deploying multiple desktops. Active Directory and WDS makes it relatively easy, even if you do need a degree in Active Directory to not screw something up. On the Linux side most of the enterprise management systems were either for Red Hat or commercial products. Please don't hang me if I'm just not aware of them because I only recently started noticing these apps.

Enter Reductive Labs' Puppet. In the past few posts I've covered how to automatically install Ubuntu Linux over the network to multiple computers quickly and easily using PXE, Kickstart and a simple script. Puppet is the icing on the cake and so much more.