Thu, 17 Sep 2009
Ubuntu Security Talk - Skills Matter September 2009
A couple of days ago I had the chance to attend a talk on PAM and AppArmor at
Skills Matter. To be honest it wasn't what I expected, the subject level
was very beginner focused, PAM only received scant coverage and the other
tools were all old hands like a port scan with nmap or basic IP Tables
rules.
The evenings highlight for me was the coverage of AppArmor, both because it's a very neat tech that seems orders of magnitude easier to use then SELinux and secondly because the last time I saw it mentioned was when Crispin Cowan spoke at GLLUG. It's great to see it in a mainline distro and I've added it back on to my experiment with list.
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Posted: 2009/09/17 22:06 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Stand Alone Puppet
While Puppet can be used to manage large, complex
environments it's also a useful tool at the lower end of the spectrum.
Using just the puppet executable and a small inline class or
two you can write very useful manifests in only a handful of lines.
class build-host {
package { "build-essential": ensure => installed }
package { "subversion": ensure => installed }
file { "/home/dwilson/repos/":
ensure => directory,
owner => dwilson,
group => dwilson,
}
}
node default {
include build-host
}
To invoke the class you just run puppet -v build-host.pp.
It's also worth pointing out the node name of default. This saves you
manually changing the manifest whenever you move to another machine.
While it wouldn't be hard to replace the above example with a shell
script, by using puppet you can easily access the built-in abstractions
(which package manager to use, how should you add users) and remove a lot
of scaffolding code. And then when you're done you can promote the class to
your managed infrastructure.
I've used this to bootstrap provisioning servers (why should the provisioning host be the only machine that wasn't provisioned?), test small but annoying new classes on scratch servers and I'm currently working on integrating it with a small subversion backup testing project in my spare time at work (so very slowly).
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Posted: 2009/09/17 21:33 | /tools/puppet | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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