Restart puppet using puppet

If you want to ensure puppet upgrade via a puppet manifest you may run into trouble when it comes to puppet service restart.

When puppet stops the service it will kill the actual running puppet process.
Afterwards puppet does not do the start command.




You can solve this by using the following service resource:

service { 'puppet':
  enable   => true,
  ensure   => running,
  restart  => '/usr/bin/nohup /etc/init.d/puppet restart &',
}

This will fork a puppet restart command in background.

Puppet 2.7.x and Debian ruby 1.9.1

According to puppetlabs one should stay with ruby 1.8.7 when running puppet - Puppet FAQ and supported Ruby versions.

Most things work, but the CA and SSL has an issue when running ruby 1.9.x - Mixing and matching ruby versions for puppetmasterd and puppetd causes a "certificate verify failed" error.

The solution is to create a symlink in the ssl certs directory as described here.

Puppetlabs removes dynamic variable scoping

When you run puppet 2.7.12 or higher you will see a warning message, telling you that dynamic variable scope look-up will be removed in puppet 2.8.x.

What to do if you have variables defined in a node definition?

1. switch to hiera
2. write a mockup

A mockup can be build in the following way:

1. write a new module with a define
2. use the define and add the proper parameter

Why do you have to do it that ugly way? Is there no way to give the scope of a node definition?

No. Nodes do not have any scope. Scope is limited to modules and classes.

class base_variable ( stage = first, dummyvariable ) {
  case $dummyvariable {
     'live': { $truevariable = 'live' }
     'testing': { $truevariable = 'testing' }
     'testing2': { $truevariable = 'testing2' }
  }
}

In node definition you can now use the define:

node 'default.server.domain.tld' {
        include stages
        class { base_variable:
                dummyvariable => 'testing2',
        }
        include base::dev
        ....
}