I'd like to extend our Puppet installation to support split production and development environments. We're using Subversion to manage Puppet configurations and already have the recommended /etc/puppet layout to handle a separate development branch.
What I'd like to do is have a centralized source of information (that is, not having to edit individual puppet.conf files on clients) to indicate which hosts are in the development environment, which seems to lead me to setting up an external node classifier. However, what I'd really prefer to do is use the external node classifier only to supply the setting of the Puppet "environment" variable, and leave all of the class membership details in our existing nodes.pp (included from site.pp). The documentation suggests this should probably work, but also says things like "If you specify any nodes in your site.pp, you must specify all nodes in site.pp, even those that are looked up via the external nodes script." What exactly does that mean? We currently have a number of Puppet clients that just use a default template without having an explicit node definition; would those have to have explicit entries in our nodes.pp rather than falling into the "node default"? We're also starting to use Cobbler for automated installation, and I've looked at the configuration management hooks in Cobbler that can be used with an external node classifier in Puppet. These are somewhat appealing, but again I'd rather not have to migrate all the class membership information into Cobbler, and only use the "kickstart metadata" field in a host profile to specify whether a host is in the development environment. Also, since using Cobbler as an external node classifier requires fetching URLs out of the Cobbler web interface to get the host data, I am nervous about causing problems for Puppet if Cobbler happens to be down. If anyone else is using Cobbler for their Puppet external node classifier, do you just have to keep Cobbler up all the time, or do you have a way to keep the external node classifier working even when Cobbler isn't up at the time? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
