Puppet on The Comfy Seat

An Unsupportable Path

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back in December I wrote about how we, the community behind the open source project called Puppet, were being forced into forking the project. In the time since then, OpenVox was born and has been diligently chugging along creating, among other things, builds based off of the last truly open versions of Puppet 7 & 8. We have also been trying to work with Perforce to ensure OpenVox remains compatible with Puppet Core and Puppet Enterprise. We’ve given them extensive feedback both in writing and via Zoom meetings on the EULA that is attached to Puppet Core to try to make it workable for the community, but they will not make the necessary changes so that it is tenable for Vox Pupuli to test our modules against Puppet Core. Additionally, they are steadfast in their commitment to keep Facter as a private repository going forward. Facter is a critical, load-bearing part of the Puppet technology stack. If they make private changes that we don’t anticipate or know to test for, it risks breaking the entire ecosystem. Similar to their promises about OSP, they said they’ll push changes back into the public repo and take PRs, but given that they have done this zero times in the last 7 months on the puppet repo, this does not seem likely.

Upgrade to Puppet 5

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today I successfully upgraded our Puppet Master from Puppet 4.x (puppetserver 2.7.2) to Puppet 5 (puppetserver 5.0.0). It was wildly helpful to go through the entire upgrade process and perform LOTS of testing and troubleshooting with the Vagrant Puppet Environmet, which is basically an exact replica of my production environment. This is an all-in-one Open Source Puppet setup and, once the next release is out, I would highly recommend for testing!

Configuration Management Part 2: puppetlabs-apache & puppet-lint

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Today was a good day. I installed puppet-lint and ran it against a custom module I’m writing for my first node and found lots of issues that it was kind enough to tell me exactly how to resolve. I then got down to using my first module from Puppet Forge: puppetlabs-apache Installing it was a piece of cake but understanding how to use it took a bit of trial and error.

Configuration Management Part 1: The Restart

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As mentioned in my last post, I’ve decided to start over on my journey to doing configuration management in an environment where we treat our infrastructure as code. Today I kicked things off by setting up a new Puppet Master on CentOS 6.5. Once my usual setup was applied to the system via a PXE boot & Kickstart installed Git and the puppetmaster package and was off.

Version Control
One of my main goals is to track everything in Git so my first task was to change the group ownership of /etc/puppet to my puppetadmins group and give them write access. Then I needed to initialize a repo in that directly, tell Git that it’s a shared repository so other admins can work in it too, and tell Git to ignore the modules folder. I then applied the group permissions to everything inside the folder, did setgid on modules & manifests, and lastly I did a setfacl on modules & manifests so that us admins would retain rwx on all files and folders. Lastly I cloned my first module from our GitLab instance into a folder under modules.

Foreman: Too Much Voodoo

Mon, 21 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got around to setting up Foreman at work and managing my first node with it. After digging around I found that I felt really boxed in using this setup because so much of the work is done behind the scenes in some magical way. One of my main goals is to facilitate the concept of infrastructure as code and, like my code, track changes via git and store them in our GitLab instance. The Foreman, as best I can tell, takes and hides everything it does inside a database which prevents me from being able to apply any version control to it’s settings. This is an unforeseen and unfortunate reality because the developers have made a really good looking product that can do a lot of really cool things. For me though, this is too much voodoo at this early of a stage of us doing configuration management and I think I’m going to back out my install and start over with a different approach that defines nodes in pain text .pp files. I’m sure I’ll take advantage of pulling in data from some external source like Hiera and / or other systems we have to help make decisions dynamically but I don’t think I want the configs themselves in a db… who knows; guess I’ll try it out and see.

Puppet, Factor, Dashboard, MCollective, Hiera, Foreman... Where does it end?

Sun, 27 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I want to setup a system based around the open source Puppet software stack… I am just not sure what the stack contains. My goal is a system that is holistic where Puppet, VMware vSphere, monitoring, revision control, and continuous integration all play well together. I also want to bring Vagrant and Packer into the mix for development environments. I’ve gathered so far that all the stuff listed in the title will be useful but what else is needed? Please comment below and I’ll also post again as I find answers.

Vagrant, Veewee, & Me (part 1)

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have toyed with the idea of diving into Vagrant for a while now and, tonight, decided it was time. I decided to be different and RTFM… this left me with two big questions: where can I get “boxes” from and how can I easily make my own? After a little Googling I discovered that Puppet Labs provides a small library of the boxes they use internally. On their page I also found the answer to my second question of how to make my own: Veewee. It seems I have a bit of setup to do before I can start using Veewee but I think it will be worth it. My plan is to bring up a base CentOS 6.4 x86_64 box and then make a Vagrantfile that uses Puppet to configure it for building RPM’s in. Ideally, I will start including this Vagrantfile with the source of any RPM I publish so that building a new one is easy-peasy.