Blog do Pedro Padron

I have to manage a few RHEL3 servers (i386), and since I’m using Puppet in my environment, it would be great to use it in those servers also. However, Puppet requires ruby >= 1.8.1, and RHEL3 ships ruby 1.6.8.

Instead of compiling ruby on the server (quick and dirty), I rebuilt the RPM based on the specs from Fedora 11. The only change I had to make was in the list of build dependencies. Here’s my note in the %changelog section of the specfile:

* Tue Oct 27 2009 Pedro Padron <ppadron@w3p.com.br> - 1.8.6.369-2
- build-deps: XFree86-devel instead of libX11-devel to build in RHEL3

Here’s the source RPM package:

ruby-1.8.6.369-2.src.rpm

To rebuild it:

$ rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'dist .el3' ruby-1.8.6.369-2.src.rpm

Here’s the list of packages that will be generated:

ruby-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-devel-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-docs-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-irb-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-libs-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-mode-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-rdoc-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-ri-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm
ruby-tcltk-1.8.6.369-2.el3.i386.rpm

If you are interested in installing puppet as well, you will also need augeas and it’s ruby bindings:

augeas-0.5.0-2.src.rpm
ruby-augeas-0.3.0-1.src.rpm

And again:

$ rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'dist .el3' augeas-0.5.0-2.src.rpm

$ rpmbuild --rebuild --define 'dist .el3' ruby-augeas-0.3.0-1.src.rpm

What I’ll describe here is the process of writing some custom facts to retrieve useful information from Parallels Plesk servers, so that you can use them in your Puppet recipes.

For those of you who don’t know what Facter is, I’ll quote the manufacturer’s description:

Reductive’s analysis tool for reporting system configuration and status, used to parametrize Puppet configurations

If you don’t know what Puppet is all about also, check it out right now or this article won’t make sense to you.

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