Puppet EPEL RHEL5/6 vs RHEL7 (2.7.25 master with 3.6.2 clients)

[Ugo Bellavance]

Hi,

I'm using the EPEL puppet packages and my puppet master (server) is on RHEL 5, so version 2.7.25.  I'm introducing some RHEL 7 test machines in my infrastructure and for now I've found that /etc/sysconfig/puppet is not used anymore so I had to change my puppet config for /etc/puppet/puppet.conf.  Anyone else running this kind of configuration?  I remember that when EPEL upgraded from 2.6 to 2.7, the 2.7 client didn't work with 2.6 server.  Now 3.6.2 clients work.  Is that expected?

I choose to stick with EPEL since puppet is only about 10% of my job so using EPEL packages allow me to have a stable environment for longer and I don't really mind not having the latest features.  Of course, I'll eventually upgrade my server to a RHEL 7 machine with 3.6.2 server.

Any comments or advice welcome.

Thanks,

Ugo

[Garrett Honeycutt]

Hi Ugo,

The master must be upgraded before the agents or in other words, the
agents cannot have newer versions than the master.

The easiest and most reliable path forward is to use yum.puppetlabs.com
(ideally, your own local mirror) as the source for your packages, if you
want to support EL 5 - 7. Using the corresponding EPEL repo for each
distro is not going to work.

Best regards,
-g


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Garrett Honeycutt
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[Ugo Bellavance]

Hi Ugo,

The master must be upgraded before the agents or in other words, the
agents cannot have newer versions than the master.

That is odd because it is actually working.  I know it is not supposed to.

 

The easiest and most reliable path forward is to use yum.puppetlabs.com
(ideally, your own local mirror) as the source for your packages, if you
want to support EL 5 - 7. Using the corresponding EPEL repo for each
distro is not going to work.

I don't like to always be on the most recent version with puppet, it moves quite fast, compared to my capacity to follow.  I know I'll have to get through this when RHEL 8 is released if I keep on using EPEL.

Thanks a lot for your input,

Ugo