Hi all,
In the process of converting a largish installation (around 150 hosts,
mixed cloud and physical) to Puppet and I have a question about how
folks manage hostnames.
The TL; DR version:
On first run, I can't use $hostname from facter as it's 'wrong'; for
things like doing host { $certname: ...} that's fine as it gets
corrected but for other things it's not. What's the best way to
have a client set it's hostname correctly, first time?
The long version:
My plan has been to base all node names on $certname as provided on
the clients by puppet.conf. Ideally, puppet will manage everything
beyond initially being told where the puppetmaster is, then it's just
cert, sign, let the agent do it's thing and life is all good.
Some of our configurations rely on having the short hostname explicitly
specified on the client and I initially was setting this via $hostname
from facter. These are RH style boxes so I'm
setting /etc/sysconfig/network via a template, /etc/hosts via the host
resource and the hostname in the kernel either by hostname(1) or
echo'ing to /proc/sys/kernel/hostname.
That's all well and good but facter runs before the first puppet run so
even if I set the FQDN everywhere $hostname is still the original one
at boot. For most things this is OK as puppet corrects them on the
second run but other things then end up with obsoleted names kicking
around or incorrect configs for the length of the run interval.
How is everyone else managing this? as so far I can't think of
an elegant solution:
* Set the hostname by hand/whatever sets certname in puppet.conf (seems
ugly to me and potentially error-prone)
* split() $certname and use $certname[0] (seems like a kludge, and I
think also will have scoping issues)
* Create a custom fact that basically does the split() on the client?
* Would stages help? is there anyway to force facter to re-evaluate its
variables (overriding them also seems kludgey)?
Is there anything else I've missed? how do you all manage it? I've seen
folks talking about Kickstart/Cobbler but that's not going to work for
my environment.
Thoughts, pointer and discussion welcome.
--
Steph Gosling <st...@chuci.org>
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