New puppet user - masterless

[pskov...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone,

We have a number of servers that we would like to manage remotely - mainly to set the servers up with relevant software/files when they are first set up. Additionally, we would like to make changes after the initial set up. For now, we would like to concentrate only on new servers and leave existing servers unmanaged. All servers are Windows ones with a mix of 2003 and 2008.

I've been playing with Puppet Open Source for a number of weeks now and I have a few questions. I am considering doing a masterless setup as we generally want to do a one time set up and most of the servers are different. There are a number of things that they share, such as hosts file but only some servers require, say, Apache installed. It needs to be easy to use and generally idiot-proof. 

I understand that with masterless set up, I simply need to run puppet apply <file.pp> on each server and that's fine. To do it remotely, I am thinking of using something like psexec tool from Microsoft. However, it's not exactly fool proof. Yes, there are a couple of front-ends for psexec but I would ideally like something web UI based. I could write my own front-end in PHP but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if something already exists. Is there something web-based that I am able to kick off "puppet apply" command from? I would ideally like to run it in Apache under Windows so I can do away with Linux altogether.

I've been battling with getting the likes of passenger working with the puppet master but essentially gave up as I am not overly hot with Linux and I've been getting a ton of dependency errors (Ruby mainly) without being able to resolve them. So, that's pretty much out of the window and partially the reason why I decided to go masterless. 

Also, I've seen a few git based solutions but having never used git, it's a bit over my head and there are no simple step-by-step tutorials that I could follow.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks

Alex

[Johan De Wit]

This book : http://www.packtpub.com/puppet-3-beginners-guide/book is
describing a masterless setup with git. As all books about puppet, the
setup is linux based.
I dontt' have any experience with windows.

Grts

Jo

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[Felix Frank]

Hi,

note that running puppet without administrator privileges for initial
server setup is probably pointless. Therefor it is my sincere hope that
there is not yet any solution to kick this off via web interface,
because that would imply serious security concerns.

I suppose you could solve this more cleanly with some sort of pull
mechanism that each Windows box invokes during provisioning (e.g. a
scheduled task) that allows you to specify the name of the desired .pp
file in a more secure location.

But then, they *do* have something similar to that, with a pretty good
security model too - it's the puppet master of course ;-)

Cheers,
Felix

On 01/09/2014 06:54 PM, pskov...@gmail.com wrote:

[Dan White]

Unless I am seriously mistaken, "masterless Puppet" is achieved by each node being its own master. 

And since puppet-master does not work on Windows (agent only) I suspect that masterless Windows puppet is mot currently possible. 

I could be mistaken. 

"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)

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/puppet-users/52CFA61E.9040708%40open-future.be.

[jcbollinger]

On Friday, January 10, 2014 6:26:25 AM UTC-6, Ygor wrote:

Unless I am seriously mistaken, "masterless Puppet" is achieved by each node being its own master. 

Then I guess you are seriously mistaken.  Masterless Puppet is normally achieved by nodes using "puppet apply" against locally-accessible manifests and data.  No master is involved.  Responsibility for distributing manifests, data, custom plugins, etc. is outside Puppet's scope in this case.

 

And since puppet-master does not work on Windows (agent only) I suspect that masterless Windows puppet is mot currently possible. 

But "puppet apply" does work on Windows, and people do use it to run masterless Puppet on Windows.


John

[Dan White]

Thank you for setting me straight, John.
Instead of sitting in my ignorance, I now stand, corrected.

“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)

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