Puppet Dashboard and Ruby 1.8.7 for EL5 systems HOWTO (draft)

[Jo Rhett]

NOTE: this is a draft document, just because there are some things here that I'd really like to improve.  Please let me know if you have a better way to do these things.  There's also a few issues with Puppet Dashboard that appear to be bugs that need either improved documentation or changes to their source RPM to fix.  I'd love to see better ways to fix this.

I am attempting to document how one can take an EL5 system (like CentOS 5.x) to Ruby 1.8.7 and meets the minimum requirements for Puppet Dashboard. There are many reasons for this:

1. PuppetLabs blames many server-side issues on Ruby 1.8.5's known memory problems.  They have indicated that only Ruby 1.8.7 is supportable.

2. Dashboard requires Ruby 1.8.7

3. Foreman requires Ruby 1.8.7

Requirements: 

EL5 system with rpmbuild utilities and ~/rpmbuild structure set up as documented nearly everywhere.  If you use different paths, adjust as necessary for the remainder of the document.

Step 1: Upgrade Ruby

I have seen recommendations for Koran's Ruby build, but it didn't build on a fairly stock EL5 system, and included a bunch of unrelated-to-puppet Tk and JP patches.  I found a much simpler spec file that appears to build properly on EL5 that uses a significantly higher patch level of Ruby, fixes the autoconf problems. It was trivial to review the few patches on this.

wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm

rpm -i ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec 

For any of the nodes, you need only put this RPM in your repository and have Puppet upgrade them.  It just works ;-)

For the passenger server, you'll need to get the source RPM from stealth monkeys.  You don't need to change anything at all -- just build the SRC rpm and it will adjust everything to use Ruby 1.8.7.  Very simple.

wget http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/SRPMS/rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm

rpm -i rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/passenger.spec 

Step 2: Dashboard Requirements

First you need to get the mysql drivers for Ruby. The EPEL version binds against ruby 1.8.5, but you can compile their source RPM on your ruby-1.8.7 system and it will work great.

wget ${EPEL_MIRROR_OF_CHOICE}/5/SRPMS/ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm

rpm -i ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby-mysql.spec 

Next thing is that Puppet Dashboard requires a newer version of Ruby Gems, but it doesn't tell you this. Instead it just barfs weird error messages.  They need to rewrite their Rakefile to explicitly define the minimum versions.

Thankfully, upgrading gems is very easy.

wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm

rpm -i rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/rubygems.spec 

Unfortunately, I never found a simple way to build RPMs for the three gems you need.  I'd like to fix this next part of the HOWTO in the near future.  For now, the easiest way to get the minimum requirements installed is to run the following commands.

gem install rake

gem install rdoc

gem install rack -v 1.1.2

You'll observe that we installed a very specific version of Rack.  The reason for this is that Puppet Dashboard includes rack 1.1.2 within the package, but the default Rakefile doesn't load it -- so it wants you to have Rack in your normal gems library too.  However if the version doesn't match the same version included in the frozen vendor directory, it complains about that and barfs. I consider this a bug in the dashboard packaging: https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/11669

However, if you install 1.1.2 and nothing newer, it will work just fine.

Step 3: Install Dashboard

For unknown reasons to me, the source RPM for dashboard can't be extracted on EL5 unless you pass --nomd5 --nosignature.  The good news is that the source RPM for EL6 compiles without any changes on EL5.

wget http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/SRPMS/puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm

rpm --nomd5 --nosignature -i puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm 

rpmbuild -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/puppet-dashboard.spec 

That's it!  You now have puppet dashboard installed with all dependancies.  You can then follow the standard documentation from puppet labs at

  http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/installing_dashboard.html#installation

Skip the first two #1 bullets and the first #2 bullet and start with the second #2.

One problem I found was that when I tried to run it under Passenger/Apache, I was told that it couldn't read the config.ru file.  I had to do the following to fix this:

  cd /usr/share/puppet-dashboard

  ln ./vendor/rails/railties/dispatches/config.ru config.ru

This is already tracked in https://projects.puppetlabs.com/users/3472

This is working great for me right now.  Let me know if you have any ideas for streamlining this process.

-- 

Jo Rhett

Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness

[Brian Gallew]

Very nice write-up, Jo.  Thanks.

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[Ohad Levy]

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 3:04 AM, Jo Rhett <jrh...@netconsonance.com> wrote:

First many thanks for your efforts! 

 

3. Foreman requires Ruby 1.8.7

Just wanted  to correct that, the upcoming version would, but we still maintain a supported version 0.4.x that works on RHEL5 with no issues.

Thanks,

Ohad

[Michael Stahnke]

Jo, thanks for this. I do most of the packaging for Puppet Labs (and
quite a bit of the ruby stuff in EPEL). I have a few comments in
line. I'd love to have this on our wiki too, so feel free to post
there as well.

One more thing to keep in mind is that EL5 only has about 2 years of
life left on it. It launched in 2007.

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Jo Rhett <jrh...@netconsonance.com> wrote:

> NOTE: this is a draft document, just because there are some things here that
> I'd really like to improve.  Please let me know if you have a better way to
> do these things.  There's also a few issues with Puppet Dashboard that
> appear to be bugs that need either improved documentation or changes to
> their source RPM to fix.  I'd love to see better ways to fix this.
>
> I am attempting to document how one can take an EL5 system (like CentOS 5.x)
> to Ruby 1.8.7 and meets the minimum requirements for Puppet Dashboard. There
> are many reasons for this:
>
> 1. PuppetLabs blames many server-side issues on Ruby 1.8.5's known memory
> problems.  They have indicated that only Ruby 1.8.7 is supportable.
>
> 2. Dashboard requires Ruby 1.8.7
>
> 3. Foreman requires Ruby 1.8.7
>
> Requirements:
> EL5 system with rpmbuild utilities and ~/rpmbuild structure set up as
> documented nearly everywhere.  If you use different paths, adjust as
> necessary for the remainder of the document.

You can install rpmdev-tools and run rpmdev-setuptree and it will
setup a ~/rpmbuild directory and proper building macros for your
system, etc.

>
> Step 1: Upgrade Ruby
> I have seen recommendations for Koran's Ruby build, but it didn't build on a
> fairly stock EL5 system, and included a bunch of unrelated-to-puppet Tk and
> JP patches.  I found a much simpler spec file that appears to build properly
> on EL5 that uses a significantly higher patch level of Ruby, fixes the
> autoconf problems. It was trivial to review the few patches on this.

The http://centos.karan.org/el5/ruby187/ are basically a drop-in
replacement for how the EL5 ruby stack worked, just upgraded to 1.8.7.
I imagine the trouble you had building is due to the method you used
building the packages. RPMs built by EPEL/Centos/RH/Puppetlabs are
built using mock. (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/Mock).
Mock assumes a group of packages is installed prior to building. That
list of packages is

install bash bzip2 coreutils cpio curl cvs diffutils fedpkg findutils
gawk gcc gcc-c++ gnupg grep gzip info make patch redhat-release
redhat-release-server redhat-rpm-config rpm-build sed shadow-utils tar
unzip util-linux-ng which xz

If you have those installed, they should build cleanly.

>
> wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm
> rpm -i ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm
> rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec

Always nice to have more options for packages. I do kind of get
bothered that I get ruby-tcl bindings all the time :)

>
> For any of the nodes, you need only put this RPM in your repository and have
> Puppet upgrade them.  It just works ;-)
>
> For the passenger server, you'll need to get the source RPM from stealth
> monkeys.  You don't need to change anything at all -- just build the SRC rpm
> and it will adjust everything to use Ruby 1.8.7.  Very simple.
>
> wget
> http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/SRPMS/rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm
> rpm -i rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm
> rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/passenger.spec
>
> Step 2: Dashboard Requirements
>
> First you need to get the mysql drivers for Ruby. The EPEL version binds
> against ruby 1.8.5, but you can compile their source RPM on your ruby-1.8.7
> system and it will work great.

This might be able to be fixed in EPEL. Since it dymaically links
against ruby, I would think that having 1.8.5 or 1.8.7 would work.
Could you file a bug at bugzilla.redhat.com on that?

>
> wget ${EPEL_MIRROR_OF_CHOICE}/5/SRPMS/ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm
> rpm -i ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm
> rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby-mysql.spec
>
> Next thing is that Puppet Dashboard requires a newer version of Ruby Gems,
> but it doesn't tell you this. Instead it just barfs weird error messages.
>  They need to rewrite their Rakefile to explicitly define the minimum
> versions.

Really? We ship rubygems 1.3.7 in Puppet Enterprise and I haven't
seen any errors. There are a few deprecation warnings though I
believe. This might be a case of exact versions of several gems all
playing together properly. Our PE preview branch (to be released
later this month) uses:
Gems 1.3.7
Rake 0.8.7
Rack 1.1.3
Dashboard 1.2.4

>
> Thankfully, upgrading gems is very easy.
>
> wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm
> rpm -i rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm
> rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/rubygems.spec

Note this can cause issues. Rubygems has a habit of completely
breaking things that used to work. *shakes fist*

>
> Unfortunately, I never found a simple way to build RPMs for the three gems
> you need.  I'd like to fix this next part of the HOWTO in the near future.

gem2rpm is fairly good as a starting point.

Package name is oddly rubygem-gem2rpm in EPEL.

>  For now, the easiest way to get the minimum requirements installed is to
> run the following commands.
> gem install rake

You should be able yum install rubygem-rake from epel. (unless the
rubygems version change prevents that)

> gem install rdoc
> gem install rack -v 1.1.2
>
> You'll observe that we installed a very specific version of Rack.  The
> reason for this is that Puppet Dashboard includes rack 1.1.2 within the
> package, but the default Rakefile doesn't load it -- so it wants you to have
> Rack in your normal gems library too.  However if the version doesn't match
> the same version included in the frozen vendor directory, it complains about
> that and barfs. I consider this a bug in the dashboard
> packaging: https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/11669

I'll have a look at that. Yeah, that's our fault and probably masked
by versions of rake shipped with EL6. (0.8.7 I think)

>
> However, if you install 1.1.2 and nothing newer, it will work just fine.
>
> Step 3: Install Dashboard
>
> For unknown reasons to me, the source RPM for dashboard can't be extracted
> on EL5 unless you pass --nomd5 --nosignature.  The good news is that the
> source RPM for EL6 compiles without any changes on EL5.

This is because the way RPM works changed between EL5 and EL6. In EL5
RPMS were built using md5 as the digest, they use sha (256 I think) in
EL6. There's not much I can do about that. If I build the RPM for
EL5, it will throw warnings on EL6; since we target EL6 that's what we
do.

>
> wget
> http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/SRPMS/puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm
> rpm --nomd5 --nosignature -i puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm
> rpmbuild -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/puppet-dashboard.spec
>
> That's it!  You now have puppet dashboard installed with all dependancies.
>  You can then follow the standard documentation from puppet labs at
>   http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/installing_dashboard.html#installation
>
> Skip the first two #1 bullets and the first #2 bullet and start with the
> second #2.
>
> One problem I found was that when I tried to run it under Passenger/Apache,
> I was told that it couldn't read the config.ru file.  I had to do the
> following to fix this:
>   cd /usr/share/puppet-dashboard
>   ln ./vendor/rails/railties/dispatches/config.ru config.ru
>
> This is already tracked in https://projects.puppetlabs.com/users/3472

That link might be wrong.

>
> This is working great for me right now.  Let me know if you have any ideas
> for streamlining this process.
>
> --
> Jo Rhett
> Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and
> other randomness
>

[Jo Rhett]

On Jan 5, 2012, at 4:53 PM, Michael Stahnke wrote:

You can install rpmdev-tools and run rpmdev-setuptree and it will

Yes of course but I wasn't documenting that here. 

The http://centos.karan.org/el5/ruby187/ are basically a drop-in
replacement for how the EL5 ruby stack worked, just upgraded to 1.8.7.

No, it combines in a bunch of other stuff *AND* it will not compile on the stock EL5 system.

Mock assumes a group of packages is installed prior to building.  That
list of packages is

…

If you have those installed, they should build cleanly.

Nope.  karan's build requires a newer version of autoconf than is available in CentOS or EPEL.  The rpm I quoted has patches so that it will work with the autoconf included in EL5.

wget ${EPEL_MIRROR_OF_CHOICE}/5/SRPMS/ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm

rpm -i ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby-mysql.spec

Next thing is that Puppet Dashboard requires a newer version of Ruby Gems,

but it doesn't tell you this. Instead it just barfs weird error messages.

 They need to rewrite their Rakefile to explicitly define the minimum

versions.

Really?  We ship rubygems 1.3.7 in Puppet Enterprise and I haven't

Yep, but you use macros only supported since 1.3.6.  EL5 has 1.3.1 from EPEL.

You should be able yum install rubygem-rake from epel. (unless the
rubygems version change prevents that)

That ruby gem requires ruby-1.8.5.  It only worked for me after I installed 0.9.2 straight from gems.

FYI, I've found some other issues:

* puppet-dashboard-workers init script uses RH6-specific functions: rhstatus_q fails on EL5.  I had to write a manifest to overwrite that file with something that doesn't use that function.  You could write that to be agnostic to the version (or provide an EL5-specific RPM)

* the monitors run, but the workers die.  They create pid files and then exit. I can't figure out why.  Right now I have to run them using the "env…" command in the bootstrapping.html documentation.  I'll resume chasing down that issue on Monday.

[Stefan Heijmans]

Op vrijdag 6 januari 2012 01:53:31 UTC+1 schreef Michael Stanhke het volgende:

One more thing to keep in mind is that EL5 only has about 2 years of
life left on it.  It launched in 2007.

That's only for RHEL5 production phase 3 (31 March 2014), End of Extended Life Cycle is on 31 March 2017.

[Michael Stahnke]

This is not surprising. I'll gladly take patches on this.

>
> * the monitors run, but the workers die.  They create pid files and then
> exit. I can't figure out why.  Right now I have to run them using the "env…"
> command in the bootstrapping.html documentation.  I'll resume chasing down
> that issue on Monday.
>
> --
> Jo Rhett
> Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and
> other randomness
>

[Dan White]

Old thread reference:

http://www.mail-archive.com/puppet...@googlegroups.com/msg27199.html

I am trying to build Ruby 1.8.7 on a RHEL 5 system following the instructions in that thread and I have a few questions as I am a n00b to RPM building:

On Jan 4, 2012, at 8:04 PM, Jo Rhett wrote:

wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm

rpm -i ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec 

For any of the nodes, you need only put this RPM in your repository and have Puppet upgrade them.  It just works ;-)

When I ran the rpmbuild command, I got no RPM's.

I got a bunch of error complaining about "rpaths", and in the output was a suggestion to prepend an environment setting to the command -- like this:

QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0001|0x0010 ] rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec

When I ran this, the previous errors were now warnings, and I got a set of RPM's.

Is this The Way It Works ?

Is it possible to eliminate the errors/warnings ?

Would a link to a PatchBin of the build output help ?

Thanks in advance.

[Jo Rhett]

On Apr 16, 2012, at 6:51 PM, Dan White wrote:

I got a bunch of error complaining about "rpaths", and in the output was a suggestion to prepend an environment setting to the command -- like this:

QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0001|0x0010 ] rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec

When I ran this, the previous errors were now warnings, and I got a set of RPM's.

Is this The Way It Works ?

Is it possible to eliminate the errors/warnings ?

Would a link to a PatchBin of the build output help ?

Yes, this is the way it works.  Read up on what those particular rpath errors mean, and I think you'll come to understand why they don't matter. But it's best to read for yourself ;-)

FYI, go edit that spec file and put the latest ruby patch release in there. There's some important fixes in the latest ruby patches, and the spec file and patches work just great with the latest ruby release.

[Dan White]

On Apr 18, 2012, at 6:08 PM, Jo Rhett wrote:

> On Apr 16, 2012, at 6:51 PM, Dan White wrote:
>> I got a bunch of error complaining about "rpaths", and in the output was a suggestion to prepend an environment setting to the command -- like this:
>>
>> QA_RPATHS=$[ 0x0001|0x0010 ] rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec
>>
>> When I ran this, the previous errors were now warnings, and I got a set of RPM's.
>>
>> Is this The Way It Works ?
>>
>> Is it possible to eliminate the errors/warnings ?
>>
>> Would a link to a PatchBin of the build output help ?
>
> Yes, this is the way it works. Read up on what those particular rpath errors mean, and I think you'll come to understand why they don't matter. But it's best to read for yourself ;-)
>
> FYI, go edit that spec file and put the latest ruby patch release in there. There's some important fixes in the latest ruby patches, and the spec file and patches work just great with the latest ruby release.

Might you be able to provide a few links or pointers to documentation and patches ?

[Jo Rhett]

I'm not sure what you mean.  For ruby, go to ruby.org and find the latest patchlevel for 1.8.7 and put that number at the top of the spec file.

For rpath, try http://www.lmgtfy.com/  ;-)

[Dan White]

----- Jo Rhett <jrh...@netconsonance.com> wrote:
> For ruby, go to ruby.org and find the latest patchlevel for 1.8.7 and put that number at the top of the spec file.
>

FYI: ruby.org is a parked domain.

“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

[Brian Gupta]

http://www.ruby-lang.org/ I think is what he meant.

[Rost]

Thanks a lot. All this works fine for me.

[devzero2000]

Sorry for the top posting.

If you look carefully you should find that this year red hat extend
the 5 and 6 lifetime to 10 year, without extended maintenance support.
But i agree that rhel 5 is not the best plattform for running foreman
or dashboard.

Regards

2012/1/6, Michael Stahnke <sta...@puppetlabs.com>:

--
Inviato dal mio dispositivo mobile

[Ohad Levy]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 9:40 PM, devzero2000 <pinto...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry for the top posting.

If you look carefully you should find that this year red hat extend
the 5 and 6 lifetime to 10 year, without extended maintenance support.
But i agree that rhel 5 is not the best plattform for running foreman
or dashboard.

I agree its probably not, but FYI we added a EL5 repo to foreman 1.0 that includes ruby as well,

see ->  http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/RPM's_distribution_based_installation and http://yum.theforeman.org/releases/1.0/el5/

Ohad

[Andrew Melo]

Hello,

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Jascha Lee <jas...@sebastian.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, January 4, 2012 5:04:34 PM UTC-8, Jo wrote:

Step 1: Upgrade Ruby

 

The puppetlabs-deps repo (http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/5/products/x86_64/puppetlabs-release-5-6.noarch.rpm) has ruby 1.8.7 RPMs

FWIW, to get this to install on ScientificLinux (another RHEL recompile), I had to disable the yum priorities plugin since it seemed to want to prioritize a ruby 1.8.5 security update over the puppet-provided 1.8.7.

-Andrew

For the passenger server, you'll need to get the source RPM from stealth monkeys.  You don't need to change anything at all -- just build the SRC rpm and it will adjust everything to use Ruby 1.8.7.  Very simple.

wget http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/SRPMS/rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm

rpm -i rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm

rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/passenger.spec

I ran into httpd.h and apr_pools.h not found errors even though I have those RPMs installed.  If I add -I/usr/include/httpd -I/usr/include/apr-1 to the gcc line that gets run, it works. Any idea of how to incorporate these into the rpmbuild process?

Thanks,

Jascha

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