puppetserver vardir configuration

[jcbollinger]

I had a bit of an unpleasant surprise today.  I discovered that my puppetserver-based master seems unwilling to put reports or other varying data where I tell it to do.

The docs say:

Puppet Server honors almost all settings in puppet.conf and should pick them up automatically. However, some Puppet Server settings differ from a Ruby Puppet master’s puppet.conf settings; we’ve detailed these differences [in the rest of the document].

That document makes no mention of the $vardir, $reportdir, or related settings, and I don't see anything that appears to be about them in the docs for the various puppetserver-specific config files, so I expect the master to read my $vardir and / or $reportdir setting from puppet.conf, and honor it.

I find instead that no matter whether I specify vardir and / or reportdir in the [master] section or in the [main] section of puppet.conf, puppetserver instead uses its default vardir, /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/puppetserver, and a reportdir relative to that.  This looks similar to SERVER-798, but that's pretty old, and it was anyway closed as "cannot reproduce".  I'm seeing this issue on the current latest puppet and puppetserver (5.5.1 and 5.3.1, respectively).

Am I missing something here?  That is, is there some other place to configure these details?


John

[jcbollinger]

Ok, now this is getting weird.

I had originally specified vardir in the [master] section of puppet.conf, and not specified reportdir explicitly.  I had that setup for weeks, and yesterday discovered reports only under a different directory, as described in the previous message.

After discovering the problem, I tried setting both vardir and reportdir in the [main] section instead, but after restarting the puppetserver service, I observed new reports still being written in the same place as before.  That's when I wrote the previous message.

Afterward, I went home for the day, leaving the Puppet configuration as it was.  This morning, I find that reports for all nodes are now being stored in the directory I designated.  Node facts, however, are still being recorded relative to puppetserver's default vardir, not the one specified in puppet.conf.  The only notable thing I am aware of that happened overnight is that a handful of new nodes were enrolled and started making catalog requests.  I did also change my environment timeout to 0 yesterday (in the [master] section of my configuration), but only before moving around the vardir and reportdir settings.

So what gives?


John