bad network causing puppet runs to hang

[Ellison Marks]

Thought I'd ask around here before I go file a bug report.

Basically, I have a few machines administered by puppet which have an unreliable internet connection. They talk to my puppetmaster on an internal network and have NAT through a router to the internet. The NAT doesn't always work. When it doesn't, puppet runs start to hang with a python script at /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/provider/package/yumhelper.py just never exiting. if I kill it, the run finishes with no changes. Sometimes it will exit on it's own after a few hours.

So, anyone else having this issue, or have I found something new.

os: centos 6
puppet: 3.0.1
ruby: 1.8.7
python: 2.6.6

[jcbollinger]

I am not experiencing the issue, probably because my machines are not routinely afflicted with unreliable networking.  If the problem is specific to the Yum provider, however, then I would look first at yum.  It has some behaviors that could very well cause delays and/or hangs under some types of unfavorable network conditions.

Specifically, you should uninstall or disable Yum's "fastestmirror" plugin on machines that cannot reliably reach the Internet, and you should ensure that all enabled repositories are pointed to repository or mirrorlist URLs that can be reached reliably.  The latter will probably require you to maintain local mirrors of all the repositories you use, but that's a pretty good practice anyway.


John