Package: puppet-agent
Severity: serious
Version: 8.4.0-1
Control: affects -1 puppetserver
In bug #1078911 [0], a user reported that a cron job responbile for
cleaning up old reports previously shipped in puppet-master was no
longer shipped in puppetserver. The consequence was an accumulation of
files under /var/lib/cache/reports until the filesystem filled up and
the system broke.
Further research has shown that the issue doesn't only affect
environments where Puppet agents are attached to a Puppet Server, but
also the "puppet apply" command which generates and stores reports
locally upon every invocation, with no automatic cleanup out of the box.
An upload of the puppetserver package adding a cleanup cron job led to a
discussion thread [1] on the puppet-team mailing list. While the
participants were unable to agree on the default retention this cron job
should follow, there was agreement that ultimately, storing reports on
the filesystem was a bad default and should simply be disabled in new
installations.
To do so requires a change in the libraries shipped by the puppet-agent
package, where defaults used by both agent and server are defined.
After consultation with the larger Puppet community on IRC, a pull
request appeared to also disable reports by default in upstream Puppet
[2]. Comments from a Puppet developper suggests this change will only be
shipped in a future Puppet 9 release, however.
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1078911
[1]
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-puppet-devel/2024-August/013829.html
[2] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/pull/9461
