possible changes to puppet config file

[Chris Price]

Hi everyone,

We've been doing some work lately to harden the pluginsync functionality for Puppet 3.x.  An issue was brought to my attention by Jeff McCune:

In current versions of puppet, it's possible to configure things like your vardir and libdir in any section of the config file; potentially, this means that you can specify a different libdir for all three of ["main", "master", "agent"].

This causes problems with respect to pluginsync; when you run an agent, it will sync down plugins / modules / faces from the master into the *agent's* libdir.  Then, when you try to run a face (even the "help" face), your libdir will be set to the "main" libdir, and thus it won't have the content that it needs from the previous agent run.

The basic problem here is that all of our various client-side programs *must* share the same libdir.  Thus, it seems that we need to restrict the ability to set these for individual client programs.

We have a short-term and a long-term solution in mind to resolve this.  In the short term, we will simply disallow libdir and related settings from appearing in any sections of puppet.conf other than "main" and "master".  (This will still allow the master to have a separate libdir from client-side programs.)  The ticket and pull req for this are here:

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/15211

https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/pull/875

Slightly longer term, we are thinking of simply removing support for "run-mode"-specific configuration sections in the puppet.conf file.  We would only allow three sections: "main" (possibly renamed to "global" or similar), "master", and "ca".  (Obviously you could still specify environments in there as well, though we probably should move those to a separate config file in the future.)

This is filed as a ticket here:

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/15212

Would love to hear any feedback that anyone has on this topic!

Thanks

Chris

[Jo Rhett]

If I am reading this right, you are maintaining the option to keep the master separate and that's good. I've only used a common vardir for agent and master at one site, and it turned out to be a disaster when we had to move it. Everywhere since I've always kept the master vardir, etcdir, etc completely separate. I would strenuously object to anything which forced these things to be shared.  To me the master and agent functionality are completely distinct and should remain so--or at least allow us to keep them separate at our sites.

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Jo Rhett

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[Chris Price]

Yes, you will still be able to use separate options for master vs. "everything else".