In my previous post I stipulated that I was PXE booting FreeBSD. Well this works and I will come back on that. But for the configuration I want to run Puppet. Nice and easy config management.
On my server I run Puppet from source. This because the server is a CentOS box with a very old Ruby and Puppet. So I decided to run the Puppet client from source as well. Getting the git repo is easy enough and installing Puppet should not be to hard.
Well, well, how wrong have I been. Every time I update the Puppet client or server something breaks. And I do mean every time.
First it started with not parsing templates correctly. A couple of hours
of debugging solved that, but then Puppet started crying with ”
Error 400 on SERVER: No support for http method POST. W.T.F. does it
mean. This somehow got solved, but then the templates broke again. The
Puppetlabs site stated (as always) to update to the newest version. So I
did. And the template error was back again, but now it was a different
one:''`Failed to parse template issue/issue.erb: undefined method 'first' for "/etc/puppet/modules/issue/templates/issue.erb:19:in`“.
Tinkering around for 4 (yes four!) hours solved this one (I can hardly
remember what I tried, but I can assure you that I have seen all sites
about Puppet that exist on the Inernet. Including the ones about
handpuppets). And then I got the 400 error again. Running in debug mode
doesn’t help either, so I’m rather stuck. Man, do I hate this type of
behaviour. Be stable or go away! I now completely had it with diving
into Puppet sources to find the culpritt. If they are still seeking for
a miracle for Pope John Paul II, maybe a stable Puppet client would be a
good idea.
I’m getting rather fed up with this stuff. Ths way I’ll never be able to update a server and be sure it will work. Maybe CFEngine3 is a better option!