The differences between using Puppet with Windows and with Linux

Here, I will tell you some basic differences and not deal with an exhaustive list of all the differences between Windows and Linux. When checking out Puppet and writing the manifests, you may realize that it is much easier with Linux but harder to complete the same tasks with Windows. Here are some examples:

• File resource: This manages the permissions, ownership, and contents of the files. Permission settings do not work as successfully for Windows, as it works for Linux; we will use ACL module for this purpose.
• Package resource: This manages the packages and software installation. For Windows, we cannot directly install a package and keep it updated as we do in Linux, because Window sit does not have a package manager such as aptitude or yum. First, we need to first find the installer and send it to the host to handle the installation.
• Puppet agent updates: These are not easy with packages and requires manual steps.
• Firewall: This has support for Linux, but not an official support for Windows Firewall. We need to write our own manifests, or we can find a solution from Puppet Forge.
• Windows Task Scheduler: This is not fully supported and has only rudimentary functionality.
• Windows Server: This has a very limited support.

This list may continue in this way. Thus, as we can see, the differences are not in favor of Windows. In this book, we will solve these types of problems and show you how to handle them in an easy way.