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OSPO @ Github

Eric Sorenson ahpook

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OSPO @ Github
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ahpook / gist:1182243
Created August 30, 2011 22:14
Use a generic client certificate with puppet

The problem

There's enough trouble with puppet's ssl model (mandatory client certs) that people go and do odd things to get around it. The primary problem is that for lab/preproduction environments, if you reinstall machines frequently, you lose access to the private key that generated the original cert but (absent some puppet cert --clean [node] operation) the cert still exists, leading to the dreaded Retrieved certificate doesn't match private key error.

A solution

Generate a single client certificate which all your nodes use, and have the master determine node names from facter rather than the SSL DN. This way you can re-install nodes with impunity and as long as your bootstrap plops down the correct config and the cert+key, you don't have any more SSL issues.

The caveats

If you have autosign turned on, this change represents a shift in security tradeoffs: you can turn off autosign and therefore more tightly control which clients can talk to your server because they need to have your clie

@jallspaw
jallspaw / gist:2140086
Created March 20, 2012 19:18
Reply to http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2012/03/ops-devops-and-noops-at-netflix.html

Adrian -

I appreciate that you spent time in writing this post. I know I've been up until 2am writing similarly long ones as well. I will take responsibility for having what is likely an irrational response (I blame Twitter for that) to the term "NoOps", but I invite you to investigate why that might be. I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way, apparently, and thus far have decided this issue is easily the largest distraction in my field I've encountered in recent years. I have had the option to simply ignore my opposition to the term, and just let the chips fall where they may with how popular the term "NoOps" may or may not get. I have obviously not taken that option in the past, but I plan to in the future.

You're not an analyst saying "NoOps". Analysts are easy (for me) to ignore, because they're not practitioners. We have expectations of engineering maturity from practitioners in this field of web engineering, especially those we consider leaders. I don't have any expectations from analysts,