Puppet users - Feb 2009 - Are version 0.24.1 and 0.24.4 good enough?

I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04
machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and 0.24.4

With more effort I could get/find the latest code in an Ubuntu-ready
repo to add to apt.sources.  (With less effort now, but setting myself
up for ongoing effort, I could manually stick the newer packages on
there, from the Debian package repo or whatever).

Are these earlier 0.24.x versions "good enough"?  Or has there been
enough important change since then, to warrant the extra effort to get
0.24.7?

(And... is there a repo I can add to apt.sources on Ubuntu to Just
Work, i.e. without any special invocations to tell APT to grab from a
Debian release name?)

Thanks for any tips from any Ubuntu+Puppet folks.

-- 
Kyle Cordes
http://kylecordes.com

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On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 12:15:12PM -0600, Kyle Cordes
wrote:
> 
> I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04
> machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and
> 0.24.4
I''m not sure which version includes Augeas support, but I''m
pretty
hooked on that myself.

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I''m thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" -- http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> I''m not sure which version includes Augeas support, but
I''m pretty
> hooked on that myself.
Augeas support was introduced in 0.24.7 - but I''m not quite able to
grok what to do with it, but I could imagine myself becoming pretty
hooked on it too.

Does someone has a brief tutorial or something? Including doing things
like adding lines to a proprietary config file?

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On Feb 7, 5:19 pm, Jon Stanley <jonstan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Augeas support was introduced in 0.24.7 - but I''m not quite able
to
Thanks for the pointer - Augeas appears to be a very good thing (I
encountered it a while back), far superior to manual scripting / sed
hackery to adjust configuration files.

Unless anyone else points out anything major though, it appears I can
safely go ahead with a variety of 0.24.x versions, get everything up
and running, then at that point (in an automated fashion) get the
latest deployed everywhere.

Kyle


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Kyle Cordes wrote:
> Unless anyone else points out anything major though, it appears I can
> safely go ahead with a variety of 0.24.x versions, get everything up
> and running, then at that point (in an automated fashion) get the
> latest deployed everywhere.
I found I needed a custom repository for local packages pretty early on 
-- things not included in stock Debian/Ubuntu installs. Newer puppet 
packages went there.

Repository setup for ftp server: 
http://blogs.cae.tntech.edu/mwr/2007/05/28/my-own-private-debian-repository/

aptrepo definition for puppet, and derived classes: 
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/Recipes/Apt_Repositories

The aptrepo definition made it much easier to include from several types 
of repositories on a case-by-case basis -- a few nodes need 
debian-multimedia, most don''t -- but all of them need to have some 
common repositories. This seemed easier than making a complex template 
for sources.list.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu

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Kyle Cordes wrote:
> 
> On Feb 7, 5:19 pm, Jon Stanley <jonstan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Augeas support was introduced in 0.24.7 - but I''m not quite
able to
The language was significantly expanded in 0.24.6 and 0.24.7 as you can
read at http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/LanguageTutorial.

Additionally, a number of bug and performance fixes appear in these
later releases.  I would also recommend using the most recent releases
and not mixing versions where possible.  Best practise is to have master
and clients at the same version.

Regards

James Turnbull

-- 
Author of:
* Pulling Strings with Puppet
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590599780/)
* Pro Nagios 2.0
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590596099/)
* Hardening Linux
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590594444/)

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 06:19:06PM -0500, Jon Stanley
wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> 
> > I''m not sure which version includes Augeas support, but
I''m
> > pretty hooked on that myself.
> 
> Augeas support was introduced in 0.24.7 - but I''m not quite able
> to grok what to do with it, but I could imagine myself becoming
> pretty hooked on it too.
> 
> Does someone has a brief tutorial or something? Including doing
> things like adding lines to a proprietary config file?
Well, a bit of a tutorial is at
http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetAugeas

Adding lines to a proprietary config file mostly means writing your
own lens for that config file, which actually isn''t that hard.  If
you want to send me an example, I''d be willing to do a writeup of
the process.

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I''m thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" -- http://shorl.com/tydruhedufogre
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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On Feb 8, 10:19 am, Mike Renfro <ren...@tntech.edu> wrote:
> I found I needed a custom repository for local packages pretty early on
> -- things not included in stock Debian/Ubuntu installs. Newer puppet
> packages went there.
>
> Repository setup for ftp
server:http://blogs.cae.tntech.edu/mwr/2007/05/28/my-own-private-debian-repo...
I''ve been needing such a thing for a few years, but have put off
setting it up. It looks like it''s time to bite the bullet.


On Feb 8, 2:05 pm, James Turnbull <ja...@lovedthanlost.net> wrote:
> The language was significantly expanded in 0.24.6 and 0.24.7 as you can
> read athttp://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/LanguageTutorial.
>
> Additionally, a number of bug and performance fixes appear in these
> later releases.  I would also recommend using the most recent releases
> and not mixing versions where possible.  Best practise is to have master
> and clients at the same version.
I will follow this advice,

> Author of:
> * Pulling Strings with Puppet
> (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590599780/)
and buy your book.


--
Kyle Cordes
http://kylecordes.com

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Instead of trying to set up a repository manually, check out
"reprepro".  It makes managing a deb repository much simpler.

Scott

On Feb 9, 2:13 pm, Kyle Cordes <kyle.cor...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Feb 8, 10:19 am, Mike Renfro <ren...@tntech.edu> wrote:
>
> > I found I needed a custom repository for local packages pretty early
on
> > -- things not included in stock Debian/Ubuntu installs. Newer puppet
> > packages went there.
>
> > Repository setup for ftp
server:http://blogs.cae.tntech.edu/mwr/2007/05/28/my-own-private-debian-repo...
>
> I''ve been needing such a thing for a few years, but have put off
> setting it up. It looks like it''s time to bite the bullet.
>
> On Feb 8, 2:05 pm, James Turnbull <ja...@lovedthanlost.net> wrote:
>
> > The language was significantly expanded in 0.24.6 and 0.24.7 as you
can
> > read athttp://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/LanguageTutorial.
>
> > Additionally, a number of bug and performance fixes appear in these
> > later releases.  I would also recommend using the most recent releases
> > and not mixing versions where possible.  Best practise is to have
master
> > and clients at the same version.
>
> I will follow this advice,
>
> > Author of:
> > * Pulling Strings with Puppet
> > (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590599780/)
>
> and buy your book.
>
> --
> Kyle Cordeshttp://kylecordes.com
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On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 12:15 -0600, Kyle Cordes wrote:
> I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04
> machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and 0.24.4
You might want to prod the Ubuntu maintainer of puppet to be a little
more aggressive pushing updates.

My policy for Fedora and EPEL so far has been to push upstream updates
to stable fairly quickly - for puppet the tradeoff between new
features/bugfixes vs. risk of regression is heavily biased towards the
former, since there is a big benefit in running the same version of the
puppet client on all your machine.

(BTW, I just noticed that we haven''t pushed 0.24.7 to stable in Fedora
yet - Jeroen is there a specific reason for that ?)

David



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On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 15:36, David Lutterkort <lutter@redhat.com>
wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 12:15 -0600, Kyle Cordes wrote:
>> I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10 and
8.04
>> machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and 0.24.4
>
> You might want to prod the Ubuntu maintainer of puppet to be a little
> more aggressive pushing updates.
>
Ubuntu and Debian have different policy to Fedora/RHEL, in that fixes
are back ported.
It''s extremely rare for new versions of anything to be put into a
released
distro for either.
-T

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On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Scott <scott.br@gmail.com> wrote:
> Instead of trying to set up a repository manually, check out
> "reprepro".  It makes managing a deb repository much simpler.
Thank you, I will study this. reprepro appears indeed to make it much
easier to make/keep a repository structure correct.

By the way, any tips for how to efficiently prepare Ubuntu-ready .debs
for the N most recent Ubuntu versions, with the right dependencies for
each, all with the current (matching) Puppet version?



On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 2:36 PM, David Lutterkort <lutter@redhat.com>
wrote:
>> I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10 and
8.04
>> machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and 0.24.4
> You might want to prod the Ubuntu maintainer of puppet to be a little
> more aggressive pushing updates.
My impression as an "outsider" is that requests to package maintainers
to update versions, are as a general trend not much appreciated  :-)


On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Thom May <thom@joost.com> wrote:
> Ubuntu and Debian have different policy to Fedora/RHEL, in that fixes
> are back ported.
> It''s extremely rare for new versions of anything to be put into a
released
> distro for either.
At the risk of being too far offtopic here on the Puppet list: I
wonder if there are, or will be, any wide-use distributions that work
differently, that update incrementally rather than a whole "release"
at a time. I imagine a world where I installed once and never upgraded
a distro release, but rather got new versions of everything a bit at
time.  This could easily create more trouble than it solves,
obviously.


-- 
Kyle Cordes
http://kylecordes.com

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Kyle Cordes wrote:
> At the risk of being too far offtopic here on the Puppet list: I
> wonder if there are, or will be, any wide-use distributions that work
> differently, that update incrementally rather than a whole
"release"
> at a time. I imagine a world where I installed once and never upgraded
> a distro release, but rather got new versions of everything a bit at
> time.  This could easily create more trouble than it solves,
> obviously.
Gentoo Linux works that way.  Works pretty well, actually.  The biggest
disadvantage is that you can''t easily trigger on OS version if you for
example need different config files for different versions of a package.
"Normal" Linux distros tries to avoid upgrading packages within a
major
version in way that requires users to change their config files; not so
with Gentoo.  You would probably have to add some custom facts to get the
version of the specific packages if you want to do such selections from
within Puppet.

(There are some limitations in the implementation of Gentoo''s package
system, Portage, that sometimes makes the incremental upgrades somewhat
painful, but they are limitations with the implementation, not with the
concept.)


	/Bellman

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On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 04:36:22PM -0500, Thom May
wrote:
> > On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 12:15 -0600, Kyle Cordes wrote:
> >> I''m looking to install Puppet on a pile of Ubuntu 7.10
and 8.04
> >> machines; apt-get in the box will get me versions 0.24.1 and
0.24.4
> >
> > You might want to prod the Ubuntu maintainer of puppet to be a little
> > more aggressive pushing updates.
> >
> Ubuntu and Debian have different policy to Fedora/RHEL, in that fixes
> are back ported.
For Debian, only security fixes are backported.  Bugfixes are not
backported - you either live with the bug or find a way to get install a
more recent version that has a fix.

There are good reasons for this but I won''t waste your time with them
unless it''s really of interest.


-- 
Bruce

I object to intellect without discipline.  I object to power without
constructive purpose. -- Spock

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On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 05:28:33PM +0100, Thomas Bellman
wrote:
> 
> Kyle Cordes wrote:
> 
> > At the risk of being too far offtopic here on the Puppet list: I
> > wonder if there are, or will be, any wide-use distributions that work
> > differently, that update incrementally rather than a whole
"release"
> > at a time. I imagine a world where I installed once and never upgraded
> > a distro release, but rather got new versions of everything a bit at
> > time.  This could easily create more trouble than it solves,
> > obviously.
> 
> Gentoo Linux works that way.  Works pretty well, actually.
It works fine for hackers, it doesn''t work nearly well for people
administering large systems that have to be stable.

OK, since this has come up, here is why Debian doesn''t backport bug
fixes and why versions are frozen: simply, people administering large
networks of hosts need to know that they won''t break in the course of
normal operations.  Because Debian only backports security fixes, you
can safely have your large network pegged to stable and run ''apt-get
upgrade'' when there are security updates, knowing that the updated
packages will not break your systems in any way.  The problem with
upgrading to newer versions of sofware is that the newer version often
has new features or new behaviour or has a completely different
configuration file format.  While good package design can get you past
some of that, by providing intelligently designed upgrade scripts, there
is only so much these can protect you (not that the Gentoo developers
even try, most of the time).

So it''s desirable not to have version upgrades except where you really
want them and have planned them and the Stable distribution guarantees
this.  For most of the packages installed on a system it doesn''t matter
that they are slightly out of date: if their features at the time of
installation were good enough for the job then they remain good enough.
Where you really need a newer version, you can roll your own or rebuild
the Testing or Unstable package for Stable (not normally very hard) or
investigate the Backports or Volatile repositories.  The point is, you
only create as much disruption and extra work as you want, no more.

There''s nothing in Gentoo''s design to stop it offering the
same
advantages (although the configuration management tools are still
neolithic and really need some work - package upgrades causing breakages
is still one of the biggest headaches for the average Gentoo user), but
it won''t be able to offer that until a proper Stable Portage tree has
been set up, along with better packaging policy and discipline.
> 
> (There are some limitations in the implementation of Gentoo''s
package
> system, Portage, that sometimes makes the incremental upgrades somewhat
> painful, but they are limitations with the implementation, not with the
> concept.)
The only way to take away the pain of cascade upgrades is to absolutely
remove the possibility of cascade upgrades, by having a Stable Portage
tree.  Unfortunately, the few efforts to make this happen have all
failed in the face of apathy and indifference.

-- 
Bruce

I see a mouse.  Where?  There, on the stair.  And its clumsy wooden
footwear makes it easy to trap and kill.  -- Harry Hill

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Bruce Richardson wrote:
> OK, since this has come up, here is why Debian doesn''t backport
bug
> fixes and why versions are frozen: simply, people administering large

Wow, I didn''t mean to set off such a thread  :-)

(As a person responsible for a pile of machines, I certainly understand 
why the distros do it the way they do it, and it''s the right answer,
and
I like it.  Most of the time.  Puppet is an example of an exception: 
the Right Thing is to run the current Puppet across N different 
distros/version.)


-- 
Kyle Cordes
http://kylecordes.com

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Kyle Cordes <kyle.cordes@gmail.com> writes:
> At the risk of being too far offtopic here on the Puppet list: I wonder
> if there are, or will be, any wide-use distributions that work
> differently, that update incrementally rather than a whole
"release" at
> a time. I imagine a world where I installed once and never upgraded a
> distro release, but rather got new versions of everything a bit at time.
> This could easily create more trouble than it solves, obviously.
If you wanted that behavior with Debian, you can actually get it:
that''s
what Debian unstable does.  However, there''s a reason why it''s
called
unstable.  :)

Debian testing is a bit less aggressive by forcing packages to wait for a
bit to be sure that there aren''t serious issues, but the security
support
is not quite as active as it is for Debian stable.

(I run Debian unstable on nearly all of my personal systems, Debian
testing on my primary desktop, and Debian stable on my personal servers.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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