Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

Managing users with virtual resources

Users are an excellent example of where virtual resources can come in handy. Consider the following setup. You have three users: John, Graham, and Steven. To simplify administration of a large number of machines, you have defined classes for two kinds of users: developers and sysadmins. All machines need to include sysadmins, but only some machines need developer access:

node server
{
   include user::sysadmins
}

node webserver inherits server
{
   include user::developers 
}

John is a sysadmin, and Steven is a developer, but Graham is both, so Graham needs to be in both groups. This will cause a conflict on a web server as we end up with two definitions of the user Graham.

To avoid this situation, it's common practice ...