After being out of the sysadmin specific position for over a year now, I decided to start building out my lab again and dusting off my skill set. This also comes at a time that I am in the process of designing a new media center solution for a family member. I remember playing around with cfengine and puppet in the labs at a former employer and decided to automate as much of it as I can. After playing with it for a few months now I have come to the following conclusions.

1.) Puppet is really cool
2.) I was doing it all wrong.
3.) Starting from scratch again taught me more about how to design it better then letting it grow organically.
4.) I am still doing it only slightly less wrong then I was in step 2.
5.) I have much to learn but have progressed far.

My original subversion repository for puppet had well over a thousand commits and since doing a major cleanup and restart I am sitting at just shy of 80 with much better results. Over this weekend I am planning on reading the best practices document and start to implement them into a personal install guide.