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Added northwestern library's use of puppet as candidate abstract.
Occam’s Reader is a software platform that allows the transfer and sharing of electronic books between libraries via existing interlibrary loan software. Occam’s Reader allows libraries to meet the growing need to be able to share our electronic resources. In the ever-increasing digital world, many of our collection development plans now include eBook platforms. The problem with eBooks, however, is that they are resources that are locked into the home library. With Occam’s Reader we can continue the centuries-old tradition of resource sharing and also keep up with the changing digital landscape.
== Using Puppet for configuration management when no two servers look alike ==
* Eugene Vilensky, Senior Systems Administrator, Northwestern University Library, evilensky northwestern edu
Configuration management is hot because it allows one to scale to thousands of machines, all of which look alike, and tightly manage changes across the nodes. Infrastructure as code, implement all changes programmatically, yadda yadda yadda.
Unfortunately, servers which have gone unmanaged for a long time do not look very similar to each other. Variables come in many forms, usually because of some or all of the following: Who installed the server, where it was installed, where the image was sourced from, when it was installed, where additional packages were sourced, and what kind of software was hosted on it.
Bringing such machines into your configuration management platform is no harder and no easier than some or all of the following options options: 1) blow such machines away and start from scratch, migrate your data. 2) Find the lowest common baseline between the current state and the ideal state and start the work there. 3) implement new features/services on existing unmanaged machines but manage the new features/services.
I will describe our experiences at the library for all three options using the Puppet open-source tool on Enterprise Linux 5 and 6.
[[Category:Code4Lib2013]]