Puppet

Release Engineering I’ve been thinking about how we get changes from a laptop into production without someone having to SSH in and type things by hand. The answer, as it turns out, is a pipeline. Nothing fancy. Just a chain of steps that each do one thing and pass the result to the next. Here’s what we’re building. Git Everything starts in a Git repository. Puppet manifests, config files, deployment scripts — all of it. If it’s not in Git, it doesn’t exist. This is the part that matters most and the part people resist the most, because Git means your changes are visible. ...

Managing services on Solaris 10 is nothing like Linux. There are no /etc/init.d/ scripts, no service command, no chkconfig. Instead, Solaris uses SMF — the Service Management Facility — and everything goes through svcadm. If you are new to Solaris, this can feel unnecessarily complicated. It is not, once you learn the pattern. Disabling a service You need root privileges or sudo access. The command is: svcadm disable network/cswpuppetd:default The argument is the service FMRI (Fault Management Resource Identifier). For Puppet installed from OpenCSW, the FMRI is network/cswpuppetd:default. The :default part refers to the default instance of the service. Some services have multiple instances, but most only have one. ...

Puppet on Solaris 10 stores its logs in the SMF log directory, which is different from the /var/log location you might be used to on Linux. If you are looking for the usual log files and cannot find them, this is probably why. Agent logs The Puppet agent (puppetd) runs as an SMF service, and its log is at: /var/svc/log/network-cswpuppetd:default.log To watch it in real time: tail -f /var/svc/log/network-cswpuppetd:default.log Master logs The Puppet master (puppetmasterd) follows the same pattern: ...

Got this from Puppet? err: Could not retrieve catalogue: Could not find class php in namespaces standardbuild at /etc/puppet/manifests/templates.pp:15 on domain.internal.com The error points at a missing class, but the real culprit is often a missing closing brace somewhere above that line. Puppet’s parser gets confused and reports the wrong thing. Check your manifests for unmatched { and }. A syntax highlighter helps — or just count your braces.