dracoblue.net

Today I ran into the case, that I have my ubuntu server with postfix running as MTA. Since there is no IMAP server or something like this installed, I use this server only for relaying/proxying the mails to my gmail account.

Setup was straight forward (choose "Internet Site" and enter the ip of the server when it asks for mynetworks):

# apt-get install postfix

The /etc/aliases looks like this:

root: [email protected]

if I want to send all mails from root to the mail address [email protected].

I want to share the way, how I manage hosts with puppet. Let's say we have a new box, which runs ubuntu.

First of all I install latest puppet and configure a hostname.

We have to check if puppet is properly installed (e.g. 3.4):

# puppet --version
3.4.0

Then we have to check if the hostname looks good with puppet's facter:

# facter fqdn
hans.example.org

If you want to configure two ubuntu nodes in such way, that the second node is a hot standby for the other one, you will need a failover ip.

First of all, set a proper hostname for your machine by editing the /etc/hostname file. Afterwards your machine needs to be rebooted or you call sudo hostname myhostname.example.org.

Since it's still necessary to have both nodes accessible, I use the following steps to make the failover ip available on both devices.

If you try to install puppet on ubuntu 12.04 precise, it will eventually fail like this:

# apt-get install puppet
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 puppet : Depends: puppet-common (= 2.7.11-1ubuntu2.1) but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: ruby1.8 but it is not going to be installed
          Recommends: rdoc
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

The puppet team provides a very easy and convenient way to get the latest version of puppet with apt-get on your ubuntu distribution. This will enable you to install the latest puppet version (3.x at the time of writing).

When I am working on craur, I try to keep every method well documented.

I define well documented in such way, that I don't document things, which php already knows (e.g. parameter count, type hinting, etc) or which are obvious when looking at the signature (e.g. type for parameter called: title).

One thing I tend to document, are examples (with @example-tag) how the code is useful. Let's take this example for the createFromHtml method in craur: