On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Scott Merrill <ski...@skippy.net> wrote:
> We'd like to control, among other files, /etc/sysctl.conf with Puppet. > We have a baseline for this file on all our servers, but frequently > some of our applications require additional tweaks. These tweaks are > generally more than a single line. > Scott, The traditional way to solve this problem is with the file fragement pattern, which would use a defined resource type to manage small file fragments of a line or two each. An additional resource would be related to all of these fragment resources and would then concatenate them together into the final sysctl file. I notice the only sysctl puppet module that's published to the Forge [1] doesn't employ the file fragment pattern, but instead manages the file in it's entirety. > I know that we could create a class in our module repository with the > necessary additions, then define that class inside Dashboard and apply > it to hosts as needed. That seems a little inflexible, as we'd need to > create a class for each app, and define inside that class the changes > that we need. > If you'd like to use the Dashboard to add new entries, then I may not employ the file fragment pattern. This is actually a pretty big shortcoming of the current Dashboard. It's difficult to have an arbitrary number of resources (sysctl entries in your case) added to the catalog based on information in the Dashboard. Today, you can accomplish this by either splitting a comma separated string, or pasting a YAML or JSON hash into the dashboard wholesale and using the create_resources() function with the resulting Puppet variable as input.. > I'd prefer a more extensible solution that abstracts this a bit. A > "sysctl-additions" class, for example, that relies upon a > Dashboard-defined variable that contains the additions to place into > the file. But how can I (easily?) add multiple lines to the Dashboard > variable? Or do I have to create multiple key/value pairs for each > line I wish to add? > You can definitely do this today, but it's far from ideal. If you'd like some examples or have more questions about the high level overview I described above I'd be happy to work with you more on this problem. When using Puppet Dashboard, how does one easily add multiple lines to > a Puppet-controlled file? Or should we not be using Dashboard for > that? > I'd really only use the Dashboard if I had to make the UI available through a browser. If you can get away with it, data in a YAML or JSON file on disk or in something like extlookup() or hiera() may be a better fit with Puppet today. [1] http://forge.puppetlabs.com/ghoneycutt/sysctl Hope this helps, -Jeff McCune -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
