Puppet to Manage Your Hadoop Cluster

Ok, I'm sure everyone has heard about how important it is to have a configuration management system up and running for your Hadoop cluster. This can't be understated enough. I have 4 machines right now, and I already HATE copying files manually between the different machines.

That said, everywhere I go, Puppet seems to be the utility of choice for this task.
http://www.puppetlabs.com

Again, I'm using CentOS (version 5.5 at the time of this writing), so you should download the RPM packages (common, client, and server) from puppetlabs and install from there.

Depending on what else you have done to this system, you may not have a repository configured that has rubygems(-stomp) available via YUM. If you get the following error, then refer to the next section, otherwise skip on down a few lines:

No package rubygems available.

In order to get the rubygems-stomp dependency out of the way, perform the following steps excerpt from http://www.threedrunkensysadsonthe.net/2010/04/mcollective-on-centos/

Enable ELFF

rpm -Uvh http://download.elff.bravenet.com/5/i386/elff-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

Install ruby and dependencies

yum -y install rubygems rubygem-stomp

A great start is to read the configuration docs:
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/configuring.html