Last night Fotango hosted a [http://www.glug.org.uk/ GLLUG] talk by
[http://madstop.com/ Luke Kanies] on the subject of [http://reductivelabs.com/
Puppet], a cfengine-like configuration management tool written in Ruby.

The talk was well attended with about 40 people turning up, including members
of [http://www.ukuug.org/ UKUUG], [http://london.pm.org/ London.pm],
[http://www.lonix.org.uk/ LONIX] and the [http://lrug.org/ London Ruby Users
Group].

The talk was very interesting and one of Luke's points stood out in my mind:
Systems administrators don't, generally, share the code they've written to
manage their environments.  Puppet, on the other hand, tries to abstract the
glue code from the detail meaning that Puppet users should be able to share
code snippets, or recipes, with the rest of the community without revealing
organisational details.  In contrast, users of cfengine will know that it's
<i>really</i> hard to find those sorts of useful examples in the wild, so I can
see this being quite a valuable resource.

Luke will be presenting again at FOSDEM this weekend, his talk is also
available on Google Video [http://tinyurl.com/2vq6mh here].

After the talk, we retired to a local [http://tinyurl.com/36oqjq pub] to
continue the discussion informally and, of course, drink lots of beer.