On 05/25/2010 12:36 AM, Atom Powers wrote:
> On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 6:42 AM, Joe McDonagh
> <joseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The only thing I can think of limitations in puppet that people
>> frequently encounter is inter-node dependencies. I'm interested to see
>> what other limitations you ran into ...
>
> I haven't tried puppet in over a year, but when I was evaluating it I
> could never get puppet to build a template from more than one piece.
> For example, if I wanted to add a line to crontab for each of several
> different classes.
>
I'd probably be able to help you find a solution though I'd have to know
more about the specific use case. The cron provider handles most use
cases well, save for stuff like cron.{daily,hourly,weekly}.
If however you mean more in general adding a line to a file in separate
classes- this is not something I would really recommend. There are ways
you can do it, such as a define that copies some functionality from
cfengine, but you might want to re-think the strategy if you end up
using that too much. But, without knowing more about the specific
situation I can't really get much more specific than that.
> Also, the Ruby dependency for puppet is something I'm philosophically
> biased against. Too many dependencies, too many possibilites for
> problems. Configuration management should be one of the most
> dependable applications on the system.
I'm not going to argue with you on this one. At this point, I believe
puppet is pretty stable, and dependable, but I can't argue that ruby is
kind of bloaty.
>
>> ... as I read a lot about puppet from
>> the mailing lists, use it a lot, and try to help out on the IRC channel
>> when I can. It's the first software package I ever felt helped me so
>> much in my everyday life that I should really help out in the community
>> with it.
>
> I felt that way when I first started using cfengine, oh so long ago.
> But now that I see all it's flaws I'd love to move to cfengine3 or
> something else that is easier to teach and handles templates and class
> dependencies better; but I have so much invested in cfengine2 that it
> it difficult to migrate away from it.
Right, this is why I probably wouldn't ever move from puppet. One great
thing about puppet vs cfengine2 at least is the modularity of it. This
allows for the community to share stuff easily. Not so easily done in
cfengine2 though supposedly a lot better in cfengine3.
>
> I'd also really, really like to have my configuration engine be part
> of my monitoring system, so that I can trigger configuration changes
> from status changes.
>
I just finished integrating puppet with nagios so that nagios configs
are automagically built by puppet. It's a little different than what
you're saying but cool nonetheless. If I include an apache class, an
apache service checks gets setup on my nagios master, stuff like that.
--
Joe McDonagh
AIM: YoosingYoonickz
IRC: joe-mac on freenode
L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire
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