Puppet Network Devices...

[fatmcgav]

Afternoon all,

in the hunt to find a mechanism to manage our new NetApp filer configuration using puppet, I've stumbled across the 'Puppet Network Devices' functionality introduced in 2. 7. The idea looks perfect in principle, however it looks like no-ones implemented support for NetApp filers as yet...

So before I embark on writing the a module to support the NetApp, I thought I'd ask the people more versed in puppet than myself if there are any known issues, challenges gotchas, tips or tricks etc to guide me on my way...

So, what's the verdict?

Any help/advice greatly received, and thanks in advance for any responses.

Regards
Gavin

[Nan Liu]

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 12:12 PM, fatmcgav <fatm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> in the hunt to find a mechanism to manage our new NetApp filer configuration
> using puppet, I've stumbled across the 'Puppet Network Devices'
> functionality introduced in 2. 7. The idea looks perfect in principle,
> however it looks like no-ones implemented support for NetApp filers as
> yet...

I'm not aware of any yet. Excited to hear someone wants to start
tackling this for NetApp.

> So before I embark on writing the a module to support the NetApp, I thought
> I'd ask the people more versed in puppet than myself if there are any known
> issues, challenges gotchas, tips or tricks etc to guide me on my way...

You should be comfortable with writing Puppet types and providers,
otherwise trying to write a network resource as a first project might
be a bit challenging. The slides from PuppetConf has some notes (start
from page 39).

http://www.slideshare.net/nanliu1

It boils down to:

* implement a transport to talk with netapp api.
* the resource type should specify apply_to_device (disable it to test
with non 'puppet device' command)
* start with puppet resource first (either hardcode or pass
connectivity info via facts).

If you run into specific issues just ask this list.

Thanks,

Nan

[Gavin Williams]

Nan

Cheers for the response... I'm an Ops guy by trade, and what coding I have done is largely on perl... So Ruby is already slightly out of my comfort zone... However I've been enjoying the puppet scripting soo far, so I'm game for a challenge...

Have found the puppetlabs-f5 module as well, which also fits our environment... So might start by getting to understand that a bit and then work from there...

Will be sure to use the list when I get stuck though :-)

Cheers
Gav