Q:

Is there any strong, well tested and general purpose puppet recipes-base to be used as starting point for customization?

I have configured a working cobbler system that successfully handles my bare metal server deployment and I'm going to start the configuration management issues using puppet (integrating it as much as possible with cobbler of course).
As it seems that on the net there are a number of sparse resources giving puppet recipes in a more or less complete set, I'm asking is someone can suggest a good and well tested set of puppet recipes that can be used as a strong starting point on which I can build my customization.
I'm looking for something well written, as simple as possible in order to be maintainable, possibly hack-less that can handle as much as possible the "standard" configurations of a server. Starting from that I'll will write my recipes, possibly specializing those already existing in order to fully handle every aspect of my servers.
My goal is to have machines that can safely formatted and reinstalled in minutes via cobbler+puppet, without human interaction.
Thanks in advance

A:

Have a look at the collection by David Schmitt http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/CompleteConfiguration . When I don't know how to do something, I turn first to David's repo and see how he achieved it. A few modules I have used directly, but mostly I use it for reference.
In practice with puppet you generally adapt other people's ideas and build your own modules tailored for your organization rather than trying to make general purpose modules that fit everywhere. The recipes are just that, starting points for you to hack away. There is no such thing as the "standard" configurations of a server - that said if you want to do it there is a good chance David has done it first.

A:

I don't believe there is a "standard base" of puppet.  Based on my own experience, mailing list conversations, and analyzing many of the recipe collections on the internets, it appears everyone has different enough requirements that they just use the existing collections as examples.  That's how my deployment has turned out.

