News from PuppetConf - Puppet 4 server and agent

Puppet is working on new stuff for Puppet 4.x
During PuppetConf they provided information of upcoming changes:

Summary of Puppet 4 features and deprecations

PuppetLabs maintains a github repo where they manage documents regarding Puppet 4.x changes, deprecations and new features.
This article is a summary on planned and implemented changes.

OpenNebula Puppet types and providers

When setting up OpenNebula one has to configure many steps.
Since I do not like manual work and due to the reason that we already had the OpenNebula Puppet module available as OpenSource on GitHub, I started working on OpenNebula types and Providers.

You now can declare your OpenNebula infrastructure in Puppet DSL:

undefined method parent for nil:NilClass

Funny puppet errors:

err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: Puppet::Parser::AST::Variable failed with error NoMethodError: undefined method `parent' for nil:NilClass at /etc/puppet/environments/foo/modules/util/manifests/init.pp:23 on node foo.bar.baz

warning: Not using cache on failed catalog
err: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run

And: it breaks always somewhere different.

Puppet rspec testing with automatic hiera lookups (implicit hiera lookup like puppet 3.x)

This article is an add-on to my other article regarding puppet & rspec.
This article only covers automatic hiera lookups used during rspec puppet runs.
Many thanks to Jan (janwaech<at>gmail<dot>com) who spend the time digging into rspec-puppet code finding this nice solution.

Debian on MacBook

There is a very good blog article which only lacks some minor information: http://www.adventuresinoss.com/?p=2516

This article adds the required information on how to get grub-efi to work in case of troubles.

Puppet and Hiera Hashes

Hiera data is great for separating code and data.
Within hiera one can put different types of variables:
- text
- arrays
- hashes

Working with text and arrays is easy for most Puppet users.

Hashes still seem to have some kind of magic.
This post tries to show you an idea on how to work with hashes in hiera.