With Puppet, if you're just learning it, what were some of your stumbling blocks? If you are an existing user, think back to that time, or times when you were talking with new users?
* ssl * ssl * dns * ssl certificates * language details * the whole puppet-doesn't-execute-things-philosophy * getting an idea where to start * did I mention ssl?
One of the ideas I had from cobbler was "cobbler check" which was a tool you could run to identify some of these problems. I'm not sure if it makes sense for Puppet, but it may do some things like say "you appear to have DNS problems resolving this, you should try..." and so forth.
something like that would be a great idea. especially for things like dns and ssl certs. It could provide errors if something is obvious wrong and warnings if something is not aligned to the conventions but could work if you set certain config options, like the master cert doesn't contain puppet.$domain and so on.
What else might there be?
James already did a great job in providing first steps examples, like the recent "write your own fact". However something that people like is to have something to start with, like a first distribute your ssh-auth key. And then what maybe might also be nice is to provide standalone-manifests (which require no master) which would configure the master in a certain manner. Like the manifests to configure puppetmaster as a rack application. So something like master_webrick.pp, master_mongrel_nginx.pp, master_mongrel_passenger.pp and so on. These would configure the master in a standard way that works. If still people like to tweak (destroy?) the config, they can do it, but most people could have a safe environment with that to start. It would also be nice to have something like: puppet_master_standalone.pp, which would configure the master for a desktop try and test setup, where a /etc/hosts entry for "puppet" would be created and so on. Simply that people don't have to crawl through documentation if they missed something during setup. Oh and for sure the obvious ::destroy classes to remove things again.
Actually the setup of puppet is more or less already quite straightforward, however there are some corner points which shouldn't be missed. People however still often miss them and as they are required to get puppet successfully running, they fail and might get frustrated. In combination with puppetcheck this might help to nail down the remaining bootstraping problems.
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