The fileserver in Puppet is useful for quickly centralizing configuration files for multiple servers. It works well for serving small text configuration files to clients, but not recommended for large files since it places them into memory before sending them out. For larger files, I recommend using git or rsync instead since it doesn’t affect the performance of the puppetmaster server.

After installing it on Scientific Linux 6.1, I had to go through some extra steps because of the SELINUX restrictions. Here’s the steps I went through to get the Puppet fileserver working.

I recently had to remove the gnome GUI from a server running Scientific Linux (6.2) and had to go through a few steps to make it boot up properly.

1. To remove Gnome from Scientific Linux, run the following command (while running outside of the GUI). This will remove all related applications related to the Gnome including Mozilla/etc.
   yum groupremove "GNOME Desktop Environment"
2. Next, you will need to make sure your runlevel is set to 3. Otherwise, you won’t be able to boot up into text mode. The run level in RedHat/CentOS/Fedora/Scientific Linux is set to 5 for Gnome/KDE. You’ll need to change the …
   

If you are setting up SSH public key authentication in a new Fedora/CentOS install, you must make sure the SELINX configuration is setup correctly for the /root/.ssh folder on the server.

The ~.ssh/ folder is not created on a new install. If you manually create the folder, set the SELINUX permissions with this command:

restorecon -R -v /root/.ssh

Another tip: If you are using the PuTTY Key generator to generate the public key, make sure you copy and paste the text into a single line in the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file. Each line of the authorized_keys file should have the following: ssh-rsa (key contents) imported-openssh-key

If you encounter the following error while installing vmware-tools in Fedora:

Searching for a valid kernel header path…

The path “” is not valid.

You will need the following packages installed:

gcc make kernel-headers kernel-devel

The trick is that you will need to perform at least two reboots before the vmware installer will actually find the kernel header package. You can verify the kernel install using “rpm -qa kernel*”

1. yum install gcc make kernel-headers kernel-devel
2. yum update
3. Reboot (shutdown -r now)
4. Run vmware-install.pl (Ex. /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib)
5. It will probably not find the kernel header path this time around. Cancel the installer if its unable to find it again.
6. Reboot (shutdown -r now)
7. Run …
   

As of January 2012, Debian is currently the most popular Linux distribution for web servers. CentOS is a close second and Ubuntu is gaining popularity.

Debian 29.7%
CentOS 29.1%
Ubuntu 18.1%
Red Hat 12.4%
Fedora 5.1%
SuSE 3.0%
Gentoo 1.2%

Source: http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popular_linux_distribution_on_web_servers