On Jan 5, 10:59 am, Nigel Kersten <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 6:56 AM, Jason Parrott <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Jan 4, 7:13 pm, Patrick <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Jan 4, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Jason Parrott wrote:
>
> > > > Greetings,
>
> > > > Our environment consists of about 600 Redhat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5,
> > > > and soon 6 servers.  We use cfengine 2 currently, but plan on
> > > > migrating to puppet.  Right now, we have our root-owned cfengine
> > > > client running every 15 minutes from cron contacting a single cfservd
> > > > server.  Additionally, our employees start their own cfengine and
> > > > puppet instances on on some servers running under their various
> > > > service accounts to manage their own software configurations (for
> > > > example, the Hadoop team does not have root access, and runs as the
> > > > 'hadoop' user with a puppet instance running as 'hadoop').  Having
> > > > multiple configuration management daemons causes increased system load
> > > > and it generally seems wrong.
>
> > > > I'd like the ability to have one puppetmasterd with our normal set of
> > > > rules (after migrating from cfengine), but allow our users to add
> > > > their own manifests.  The trick is that these manifests must run as
> > > > their service account and not as root.  For example, I'd like to pull
> > > > in manifests from a hadoop/ directory, and any file edits, copies,
> > > > package installations, etc will run as the 'hadoop' user.
>
> > > > I've been thinking about adding a custom provider, one which wraps
> > > > commands with "su -c "command" hadoop", for example, but I'm not sure
> > > > how feasible this is.
>
> > > This still gives them root access.  All they need to do is use a normal
> > provider.
>
> > > What about running both instances of puppet from cron?  That should save
> > you the resources.
>
> > Thanks for your input guys.  Although it does seem the most simple
> > solution would be to run separate puppet client process in cron for
> > each user, I'm afraid it won't scale well long term for us.
>
> > If this catches on beyond the dozen or so users we have now, I can
> > imagine 1000+ service users wanting to take advantage of puppet.  At
> > that point, I'd be attempting to spread out the cron entries so that
> > they all didn't run at the same time, but at some point my server
> > would be running a cron entry every few seconds, or I'd have to lower
> > the frequency of updates .
>
> > It seems smarter and have less overhead to let one client instance
> > running as root drop privileges on a per-module basis.  Has anyone
> > thought of, or are there any plans to extend access controls to allow
> > modules to be contained as a user, or perhaps even inside a chroot?
> > I'd really love to have one puppet client instance run and not have to
> > add rules to manage cron entries for every service user on a
> > particular system.  I could allow our employees to package and deploy
> > modules to our puppetmaster, and somehow guarantee that those modules
> > would be run in a secure way.
>
> > As a short term solution, I like the idea of running an instance of
> > puppet from cron per service user.  The root-owned instance would sync
> > the files, and the service-user-owned instances would read from their
> > particular subdirectory.  However, I'm still interested in a long term
> > solution that doesn't involve the cron overhead across more than a
> > handful of users.
>
> Can you put a feature request in for this please Jason? I can't promise
> anything, as I expect there are a fair few complicating factors that make
> implementing this non-trivial, but it's certainly worth capturing as a
> feature request.
>
> http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppet/
>
>
>
> > Thanks again,
>
> > Jason
>

Absolutely.  Thanks Nigel.

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/5779

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