For a few months I had no time to invest in puppet and I ended migrating three minor versions of puppet. Namely from 0.24.4 to 0.24.7; three minor versions that moved puppet forward and caused some havoc on my systems.

With the new version Webrick’s performance was even worse than before. Plugins took forever to sync and most client just gave up with a timeout while retrieving plugins.

So the update was also motivation enough to switch to mongrel plus nginx. The instructions at puppet’s wiki are good enough. Once every thing was working properly the performanced skyrocketed, with mongrel my clients fetch and run its catalogs in a fraction of the time required with webrick; Hooray!

Only a issue with my prior client access control, had to disable any IP restrictions on fileserver.conf using Allow *. The issue has to do with nginx and mongrel unable to properly communicate the Ip of the client and seems fixed since a month ago.

When i firs heard of chef i got a litle worried about the possible damages to puppet as a community and as a project. It seemed weird to me to hear from chef on the #puppet irc channel and also weird were some of the opinions on the blogs of Chef’s evangelist (in particular one impliying bad behavior from Lak when he asked for money/contract to fix a particular issue).

In my opinion puppet is a well-behaved FLOSS project that is fostering community, writing code, and earning money. I’m glad to see those same worries of community hijacking being discussed in puppet-users. And even happier seeing the changes in licensing and focus that are underway at reductivelabs.

So, cheers for reductivelabs for keeping the good work and trying new roads to grow and prosperity. Let’s not repeat the Tla Tale.

You can read the (now old) news about Chef at The Madstop.