Configuration-Management on Giedrius Statkevičius

Equivocal Puppet Class Parameters

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 20:13:43 +0000

While working with Puppet recently I have noticed that there is some funny business going on with the rules of parameter naming. The Puppet’s documentation states:

Parameter names begin with a dollar sign prefix ($). The parameter name after the prefix:

Must begin with a lowercase letter.

Can include lowercase letters.

Can include digits.

Can include underscores.

Let’s see if this is true. Tried applying this manifest with Puppet 5.5.10 which is available on Ubuntu Focal Fossa (20.04):

How to solve puppetdb and SIGKILL problems

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 20:45:17 +0000

In this post, I wanted to share some knowledge that I have gained recently. Sometimes your Puppet server might start returning 500 HTTP status codes. You should check puppetserver’s logs first of all, of course, but another thing to check is the puppetdb. puppetdb is the component which is responsible for storing Puppet-related data. In this case, there were memory-related problems on the puppetdb instance. The puppetdb logs in this case have looked like this:

What I would love to see in the Puppet configuration management software

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 20:01:09 +0000

Image result for puppet

I have been using Puppet off-and-on by now for almost a couple of years and saw it transform from a domain-specific language with lots warts to a pretty and functional language. However, not all is completely fine and dandy. I feel that in some ways it could still be improved a lot.

Namespaces support of modules in environments

Puppet has somewhat good support for namespaces in the code with the special delimiter of :: which has a magical meaning for it: the Puppet agent expects to find the code in one level deeper when it sees such thing in a class name or a define. From now on, I will only talk about class objects and not other things which work similarly from the point of view of the parser. However, at the top level, all names of the class definitions (before ::, if it exists) are at the same, top-most scope. In a very big environment, you could easily run into such a situation that two different modules (competing implementation) configure the same piece of software and they have identical names.