is there a Puppet facter plugin repository please ?

[Christophe L]

Hello,

We are currently evaluating Puppet and Chef on several criteria and we
have found a big difference between the amount of information
retrieved by Facter in Puppet and the amount of information retrieved
by Ohai in Chef for a same virtual machine.

There is about 2000 lines in the JSON file provided by Chef when there
is only 72 lines in the YAML file provided by Puppet.

For Chef, it is a formatted JSON so there is a certain amount of lines
because of the json hierarchy and there is too a lot of "Not
Specified" data meaning no useful data, but even comparing the raw
useful data, there's still a big difference.

We would like to know if there are plugins / modules for Facter that
are freely available and would permit to fill the gap between Puppet
and Chef on this aspect.

Could you please give us some links on facts that are not included in
facter and would permit to retrieve more information on the nodes ?

Unless we miss some configuration or documentation from puppetlabs
which would permit to extract more facts from nodes ?

Thanks in advance for your help

Best regards,
Christophe

[Gary Larizza]

Christophe,

Let me ask a question: what extra information is Ohai providing (that Facter does not currently) that you would be using in your manifests/cookbooks?  Usually people utilize similar bits of Facter-provided information (operatingsystem, release version, ipaddress, interfaces, domain, hostname, fqdn, etc...) but the other information they want to utilize is fairly specialized to their organization (role, environment, location, group, etc...).  In the latter case, you would need to create custom facts to define those anyway.  I AM genuinely interested in the information that Ohai is providing (that Facter is not) that you find useful - we're definitely open to providing more useful information.

As for a fact repository, facts are provided inside modules in our Module Forge (forge.puppetlabs.com) inside the lib/facter directory of Modules.  Many modules contain facts, and I encourage you to check there for more information :)

Cheers!

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[Christophe L]

Hello Gary,

Thank you for your answer.

First, I should have written about "raw meaningful data" rather than "raw useful data" because you are right that a lot of the extra information are not actually useful :)

For information, the aim is not to use the information in modules, but to fill a CMDB system from the information extracted from Puppet or Chef.

But there are still some information not provided by puppet that we would need, for example:
- IPv6 of the server (we got only the IPv4)
- release date of the bios ( that can give an idea about the date of manufacturing of the server)
- family, vendor, speed of the CPU cores
- on linux, mounting points with size allocated and filesystem type

Actually, there may be others but I have not looked yet in details in the Chef file because there is too much in it ;)

About the module forge, I went there and found only two modules which looks related to facter
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/tags/facter

are there more modules that I have not seen ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Best regards,
Christophe

[Ryan Coleman]

Hi Christophe,

The facter tag is something a user would have to use when they release
their module. There are many more custom facts on the Forge that
simply aren't tagged. Your thread inspired me to create a feature
request for searching specifically for facts:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/14431

If you haven't already discovered this, it's quite easy to create your
own custom facts for getting the information you want and we'd love to
see you upload those additions to the Forge.
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/custom_facts.html

Cheers!

--Ryan

[Philip Brown]

On Friday, May 11, 2012 11:42:52 AM UTC-7, Ryan Coleman wrote:

Hi Christophe,

The facter tag is something a user would have to use when they release
their module. There are many more custom facts on the Forge that
simply aren't tagged.

Given that the current module definitions require known locations for factor extensions, I find this a bit odd.
How about making the uploader autotag 'facter' any module that has files under lib/facter ?
 

[Ryan Coleman]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Philip Brown <ph...@bolthole.com> wrote:
> Given that the current module definitions require known locations for factor
> extensions, I find this a bit odd.
> How about making the uploader autotag 'facter' any module that has files
> under lib/facter ?

That's precisely what I'm asking for in the Forge feature request. It
shouldn't be hard for us to do, it's just not there yet. :-)

[Trevor Vaughan]

Christophe,

I would suggest not using Puppet or Chef to pass data around
constantly that isn't going to be used by your actual code. Instead,
you might want to set up a proper SNMP infrastructure such that you
can get all of the information that you want and poll your network
devices, etc... with the same mechanisms.

AFAIK, all of the information that you've asked about is natively
hooked into SNMP in most modern operating systems and relatively
easily enabled for collection.

Thanks,

Trevor

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