Puppet, an automated administrative engine for your Linux and Unix systems, performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Documentation (and detailed install instructions) can be found online at the Puppet Wiki.

Generally, you need the following things installed:

• Ruby >= 1.8.1 (earlier releases might work but probably not)

• The Ruby OpenSSL library. For some reason, this often isn't included in the main ruby distributions. You can test for it by running 'ruby -ropenssl -e "puts :yep"'. If that errors out, you're missing the library.

  If your distribution doesn't come with the necessary library (e.g., on Debian and Ubuntu you need to install libopenssl-ruby), then you'll probably have to compile Ruby yourself, since it's part of the standard library and not available separately. You could probably just compile and install that one library, though.

• The Ruby XMLRPC client and server libraries. For some reason, this often isn't included in the main ruby distributions. You can test for it by running 'ruby -rxmlrpc/client -e "puts :yep"'. If that errors out, you're missing the library.

• Facter => 1.1.1 You can get this from your package management system or the Facter site