About every three months I poke around the internet for info on Puppet (or Chef or cfengine or Capistrano etc etc). Every time I walk away because its such a leap from their “about” page to how it would concretely help me, let alone how I could possibly make up for the time it would take to adopt it and the discipline to stick with it.
Other times I run into hilarious horseshit like this and its not even a tough call:
The 1.8.5 branch of Ruby shipped will RHEL5 can exhibit memory leaks. If you are running a recent version of Puppet and you’ve noticed your ruby processes grow very large over time then you may be affected by this. The solution is to upgrade your version of Ruby to 1.8.6 or greater. The Source RPM distributed with Fedora Core 9 recompiles and upgrades cleanly on RHEL5 with minimal dependencies and greatly improves puppet’s performance & stability, particularly on a busy puppetmaster. You may also need to recompile some libraries – particularly libshadow, if you want puppet to manage your passwords.
Hacking one distro’s packages into another and living with a random crapshoot of “should work” libraries from then on is exactly 100% the opposite direction I need a systems management tool to go.