Chef and Puppet, Take 2

A few weeks ago I announced my intent to compare Puppet to Chef, then quickly got bogged down with, among other things, needing to get my Typo installation up to snuff.

I’m going to take another shot at this, with the initial goal of getting Puppet and Chef running on CentOS 4.7 inside VirtualBox on a OsX 10.4 system.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a semi-free virtual environment from Sun. The open-source version seems suitable for server testing, but there’s also a more fully-featured proprietary version. I’m choosing it because I have more space on my $WORK system then my personal system, but I don’t have a VmWare Fusion license. Further, my home virtual Linux systems are all Ubuntu, and $WORK is RHEL, so there’s more point to this exercise using a RHEL-derived system if I’m going to get some traction on my plan to get a configuration-management system rolling at my workplace.

Creating a new VirtualBox

First I’m going to get two instances of Damn Small Linux. In VirtualBox

• click “New”
• select “Linux”, “Debian”, “256 Mb Ram”, “34 Mb hard drive”
• create
• in the system description, select CD/DVD-ROM and connect to the .iso image
  • in VirtualBox, you ‘Add’ isos from various places in your filesystem to a list of available ISOs, so add dsl-4.4.10-initrd.iso
• Press ‘Start’ then you get an info window on which key to use to de-associate your keyboard from the GuestOS.
• DSL (DamnSmallLinux) boots astonishingly fast
• The process of cloning a system is not worth it for a diskless system. Just make DamnSmall2 following the same steps.

Out of the box, this created two hosts connected to the world via NAT, but both apparently on the same IP address (10.0.2.15). So far, so good.

What I want is:

• All VMs to have NAT access to the world, and SSH access from the host operating system via port-forwarding.
• All VMs to communicate with each other over an internal-only network at 192.168.5.0

It seems that the VirtualBox tutorials out there really muddy up the water. It’s not that hard.

NAT and port-forward ssh access

• VirtualBox configuration
  • Add network adapter 1 as NAT
  • Run the following script

# Number all hosts up from 1
host=DamnSmall1
port=2201

# let eth0/adapter1 be DHCP NAT
VBoxManage setextradata "$host" \
    "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/Protocol" TCP 
VBoxManage setextradata "$host" \
    "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/GuestPort" 22 
VBoxManage setextradata "$host" \
    "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/guestssh/HostPort" $port

• Guest Host Configuration—turns out the IP doesn’t matter ‘cause we use port-forwarding to reach the host
  • Debian /etc/network/interfaces

iface eth0 inet dhcp

Internal Networking on Static IPs

• VirtualBox Configuration
  • Connect Adapter 2 to ‘intnet’ internal network
• Guest Host configuration: Set up eth1 static ip addresses internally, e.g.
  • Debian /etc/network/interfaces

iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.5.201
    netmask 255.255.255.0