Getting Started

Well, my first step was to get puppet installed on my desktop. As my home network consists of only a desktop and a netbook, I decided to make my desktop both the puppet master and a puppet client. The Puppet Labs website discourages users from using the version of Puppet provided with one's Linux distribution of choice (mine being CrunchBang, a light-weight Debian Stable variation), so I created a puppet.list file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d consisting of only the following line:

deb http://apt.puppetlabs.com squeeze main

The subsequent "sudo apt-get update" complained about an invalid GPG key, but I ignored it. I ran "sudo apt-cache search | grep puppet" and noticed puppetlabs-release, which installed the GPG key and created an apt repo file of its own called puppetlabs.list. I deleted my initial repo file and reran the apt-get update, this time without errors. Then I installed the puppet and puppetmaster packages. The familiar /etc/puppet directory structure was there, but there were no files under manifests, modules or templates. This truly was starting from scratch.

Deep Breath...