External facts based on OS

[Aditya Gupta]

Hello All,

I have created two types of external facts :

1. windows based on powershell

2. Linux based on bash

And i have placed these in <MODULEPATH>/<MODULE>/facts.d/ folder.

I have to copy everything whatever is present in this folder to the all client.So i am using pluginsync=true

is there a way to transfer external facts scripts based on operating system.

Thanks,

Aditya

[Michael Smith]

There currently isn't a way.

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Since this is the developer's list, I'll go into some details about what would be required for it to work:

Currently pluginsync happens before any facts are returned to the system. This makes it difficult to do anything based on OS version. I've had chats about changing Puppet's communication a bit so it sends some core facts (this might have a lot of overlap with things that could be trusted facts - osfamily probably isn't going to change without requiring a new certificate) before pluginsync so they can be used to determine the environment during node classification; using them to do more precise pluginsync also makes sense.

Then you need a way to determine which plugins to sync. I see three options

- have a way to query Facter for platform-specific criteria for external facts, and send that to the master to be used in evaluating which facts to sync

- have a hierarchy in external facts, so you can explicitly target facts at certain classes of machines based on the core facts sent before pluginsync; that might interact in useful ways with Facter's upcoming config file, but would need some way in each module to also specify what facts are synced where. Something simple might be syncing based on osfamily, so you'd have

<MODULEPATH>/<MODULE>/facts.d/windows

<MODULEPATH>/<MODULE>/facts.d/redhat

etc.

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[Reid Vandewiele]

Regardless of the fact that this is on the developer's list, it's worth mentioning that from a use-case perspective it may not actually be necessary to worry about that too much. Even though the entire contents of the directory may be synced (and Michael correct me if I'm wrong about this), when it actually comes time to execute external facts Puppet is already intelligent enough to execute only certain kinds of scripts on Windows, and others on Posix systems. Given that your use case sounds like it's just for Windows vs. Linux, this should be sufficient to run facts cleanly and return values only for relevant platforms, even though all systems will have a copy of all facts including the ones they can't and won't evaluate due to platform incompatibility.

https://docs.puppet.com/facter/3.1/custom_facts.html#executable-facts-----unix

https://docs.puppet.com/facter/3.1/custom_facts.html#executable-facts-----windows

If you need to worry about fine-grained differences like between RHEL and Debian, then today at least the bash scripts themselves would need to contain that logic.

~Reid

[Michael Smith]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2016 at 1:25 AM, Reid Vandewiele <re...@puppet.com> wrote:

Regardless of the fact that this is on the developer's list, it's worth mentioning that from a use-case perspective it may not actually be necessary to worry about that too much. Even though the entire contents of the directory may be synced (and Michael correct me if I'm wrong about this), when it actually comes time to execute external facts Puppet is already intelligent enough to execute only certain kinds of scripts on Windows, and others on Posix systems. Given that your use case sounds like it's just for Windows vs. Linux, this should be sufficient to run facts cleanly and return values only for relevant platforms, even though all systems will have a copy of all facts including the ones they can't and won't evaluate due to platform incompatibility.

https://docs.puppet.com/facter/3.1/custom_facts.html#executable-facts-----unix

https://docs.puppet.com/facter/3.1/custom_facts.html#executable-facts-----windows

Yes, on POSIX systems we look for executable files, on Windows we use extensions (so don't give your Windows scripts the executable bit).

[Aditya Gupta]

Thanks for the answer.

But as i can see windows system will not do anything for Linux external facts but returned the message "File was parsed but return empty data set"

How can we avoid these messages as we knew specific external fact is not relevant for windows.

[Michael Smith]

Which version of facter are you using? You might try to narrow it down to which file is generating that message, some details about it might help understand why it's happening.

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