What to buy?

We have a decent wodge of credit with Amazon (a friend paying us back for some stuff) but not much idea what to do with it. Our original plan — pre-orders of Spore and Wrath of the Lich King have gone out the window as they only want to send the former via priority courier (costs US$40!) and they won’t ship the latter out of the US…

(Yes, yes, we could probably do the relay thing, but the point of a pre-order for WotLK would be to have it on launch day, so…)

Now thinking maybe all six seasons of Scrubs, but that doesn’t account for all of it.

Time was I’d have had absolutely no trouble just buying $1000 worth of CDs in a single batch. Clearly things have changed!

Popularity: 27% [?]

Tags: Random by matt
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Puppet hints

When they say “webrick is crap, use mongrel” they really do mean it. Webrick is enough to do a little basic testing to satisfy yourself that this tool might be useful to you, but once you’ve got even 50 machines talking to it, it starts failing all over the place.

Takes extra work to set up mongrel, but TFM is pretty much spot-on in this respect.

Also: don’t bother running puppetd as a daemon. Run it from cron with “–onetime –splay” instead. Hell, have it set up its own crontab entry:

        cron {puppetd:
                command => "puppetd --onetime --splay",
                user => root,
                minute => [ 15, 45]
        }

Use modules. Use them from the very start. They really do make life easier, and if you use them from the start then you don’t have that awkward period when you’ve got 50+ machines using an old un-modular configuration and now you have to very carefully migrate them all.

(i.e., don’t be an idiot, do what I say, not what I did!)

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Tags: Tech by matt
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