How to add a file to the home directories of all existing and future users

Now I suffer from a mental buffer overflow and little confidence of ever being able to tame this beast.

First: Relax. I've learned that, when you're new to something with a learning curve such as Puppet, it is pretty easy to become overwhelmed and not be able to get much done.

is his login thebob then defined two times, in lanusers.pp with groups => ["lan"] and in shellusers.pp with groups => ["shell"]?

Nope. Virtually define it in one place (maybe users.pp) with groups => ['shell', 'lan',].

On the nodes, realize the users you need. For example, if for node beamin we want all shell users:

node beamin {
    Account <| groups == 'shell' |>
}

What if Bob wants his lan password to be separate from his shell password?

Then Bob should probably get 2 different accounts with different login names.

There are several ways my favourites are the following three:

• For our migration from apache1 to apache2 we created completely separate modules. You'd think this caused a lot of duplication, but we redid our config at the same time.

• For simple upgrades of single packages, we do things like

  package{"foo":
      ensure => $wants_foo_upgrade ? {
          true => latest,
          false => 1.0
      }
  }
  

  where $wants_foo_upgrade is based on our infrastructure database, extlookup data or facts

• For things in the middle, we take the second approach and use that variable in determining which configfiles to use, or in templates for configfiles.