Dashboard running in masterless puppet

[Gonzalo Servat]

Hi All,

I'm running Puppet in masterless mode and trying to make Puppet dashboard play nice with it in this non-standard setup.

I'd love to hear how other people are doing this. The process I have in mind is:

1) Run "puppet apply" from cron on each node

2) Rsync (using --remove-sent-files) the reports from each node's /var/lib/puppet/reports dir back to the puppet dashboard server

3) Run rake:import

The issue I'm having is that rake:import will create a new failed task for every report that already exists in the database. It does skip them, but I don't want to be notified it's a failed task when it skips them. I was thinking of deleting old reports, but given that they get imported by the delayed task workers, it is hard to know which reports have been processed to avoid deleting a report that hasn't been imported yet.

If I can find a way to stop it reporting skipped reports as failed tasks, then I should be OK.

Any ideas? Anyone else running Puppet dashboard with masterless Puppet?

- GS

[Dan Ng]

I just came across the dynamic of running Puppet in a masterless mode.  Was there a tutorial that you had followed in order to configure it that way?

Thanks!

[Martin Langhoff]

Hi Gonzalo,

> I'm running Puppet in masterless mode and trying to make Puppet dashboard
> play nice with it in this non-standard setup.

some of the tricks that are useful in this kind of scenario are
encapsulated in puppet-git / ppg, which I've written, and use at
Remote Learner, where it is gradually taking over an infra with >2000
VMs.

http://repo.or.cz/w/puppet-git.git

> I'd love to hear how other people are doing this. The process I have in mind
> is:
>
> 1) Run "puppet apply" from cron on each node

yep. You can use --detailed-exitcodes and do something smart about
failures. At the risk of sounding like a broken record... ppg has
example code...

> 2) Rsync (using --remove-sent-files) the reports from each node's
> /var/lib/puppet/reports dir back to the puppet dashboard server

In my case, the chosen transport mechanism is git protocol. ppg pushes
it back to a different git repo (pulls from puppet.git, pushes reports
to reports.git ) . There's code in ppg to "trim" git history.

> 3) Run rake:import

Instead of that, my code is using curl:

http://repo.or.cz/w/puppet-git.git/blob/670a12233f563d47e32e47f09214590e26451a5a:/ppg-reports-to-dashboard#l38

this is barely tested, and we haven't put it in prod yet. It mimics
what the puppet clients do.

> The issue I'm having is that rake:import will create a new failed task

I haven't got the foggiest idea about using rake:import. Have not dug
into Puppet/Dashboard/Ruby internals too deep yet.

cheers,


m
--
martin....@gmail.com
- ask interesting questions
- don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
~ http://docs.moodle.org/en/User:Martin_Langhoff

[Martin Langhoff]

Hi Dan,

there's quite a bit. Google for 'masterless puppet howto' to find a
couple tutorials and discussions that are popular. Add 'git' to the
search string for more quality options...

The main benefits are

- scalability
- pull model -- see http://www.infrastructures.org/bootstrap/pushpull.shtml

The main drawbacks are

- loss of some dynamic configuration features -- like the
configuration database, what'sitsname?
- all clients see the whole configuration -- however I would be
personally unwilling to rely too much on this feature of the puppet
server


Myself, I "seeded" my architecture with those tutorials, and wrote the
ppg wrapper/scaffolding/infra I discussed above, which adds some good
bits that Puppet lacks:

- scheduled rollouts (i.e.: make this effective at 3am)
- force a specific rollout to happen _now_ (using an ssh loop with an
unprivileged account to touch an inotify trigger)

Here's a reasonably good thread
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/7ZpAMrMb2NQ

cheers,



m

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