The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it.
"Puppet was mind-bogglingly slow"
Was it a pause exactly equal to one DNS lookup timeout? The SSL inside puppet used to get all wound up about reverse DNS matching the forward or whatever exactly. You need working DNS to puppet. If DNS is dead you may as well forget debugging puppet until your local DNS is healthy.
Also its possible to do unusual SSL configurations that can make it a bit slow. Vanilla out of the box should be reasonably fast. Starving a virtual image of CPU can make the SSL slow... a virtual 40 MHZ 386 equivalent is not going to do SSL any faster than a physical 40 MHZ 386 used to.
"The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it."
It might be a simple apt-get command, but consider setting up Chef Server. You're suddenly adding the following to your system: Ruby, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, Java, merb-assets, merb-core, merb-helpers, merb-param-protection, merb-slices, thin, solr-jetty. And then maybe libxml-ruby, merb-haml, haml, coderay. (From http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installing+Chef+Server)
That's a whole heap of stuff and moving parts I wasn't looking for. Compare that to the above mentioned Ansible or cdist on the lightweight end of the spectrum.
What distro are you running that's got current Puppet/Chef releases in its archives?
The story may be better for puppet, but with chef, it's pretty much "off to the racetrack" to get the latest and greatest Ruby, Chef, and other deps installed.
The job of an OS not a human admin. "apt-get install puppet" on the clients and "apt-get install puppetmaster" on the puppetmaster. That's about it.
"Puppet was mind-bogglingly slow"
Was it a pause exactly equal to one DNS lookup timeout? The SSL inside puppet used to get all wound up about reverse DNS matching the forward or whatever exactly. You need working DNS to puppet. If DNS is dead you may as well forget debugging puppet until your local DNS is healthy.
Also its possible to do unusual SSL configurations that can make it a bit slow. Vanilla out of the box should be reasonably fast. Starving a virtual image of CPU can make the SSL slow... a virtual 40 MHZ 386 equivalent is not going to do SSL any faster than a physical 40 MHZ 386 used to.