Puppet users - Apr 2011 - Getting client information instantly

Hi all

I wanna take a list of running services on the client instantly. Can I
do this with puppet?
For example, is it possible to write a custom facter and send it to
the client so I can get the running services information whenever I
want via REST. Is my logic correct? Or there is another thing to solve
this problem?

Thanks

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Sound like you need  MCollective: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/


On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 6:12 PM, John Chris Richards
<john.chris.richards@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I wanna take a list of running services on the client instantly. Can I
> do this with puppet?
> For example, is it possible to write a custom facter and send it to
> the client so I can get the running services information whenever I
> want via REST. Is my logic correct? Or there is another thing to solve
> this problem?
>
> Thanks
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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>
>
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On Apr 10, 5:12 pm, John Chris Richards
<john.chris.richa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I wanna take a list of running services on the client instantly. Can I
> do this with puppet?
Not really, no.  Puppet does not query client nodes, neither on a
schedule nor on demand, and it does not track information about
resources (such as Services) that are not managed for the node in
question.
> For example, is it possible to write a custom facter and send it to
> the client so I can get the running services information whenever I
> want via REST. Is my logic correct?
No, your logic is not correct.  You could certainly write a custom
fact that collects information about the services running on a client,
but that will not allow you to obtain an up-to-date result on demand.
The client will publish the fact value every time it requests a
catalog from the master (every 30 minutes by default), and there are
several ways you could cause the master to store that information
somewhere, but that''s not the same thing.
>Or there is another thing to solve
> this problem?
Not in full generality, no, because there''s no reliable way to
determine what processes running on the client are "services".

Basically, you can do something like this:

ssh <root@node> -c "ps -e"

, which gives you all running processe without distinguishing what
might be a service (whatever that means to you).  Or you can do
something like this:

ssh <root@node> -c "for s in $(/sbin/chkconfig --list); do /sbin/
service $s status; done"

, which tells you (on a system with chkconfig) which registered
services are running, as judged by their initscripts''
"status"
command.  That doesn''t tell you anything about unregistered services,
however, and it may not be 100% reliable for registered ones.

Or you can write a custom service inquiry script of any complexity you
desire, push it out to clients with Puppet, and run it at need.

MCollective might provide a convenient interface for issuing the
remote commands (instead of ssh -c), but it doesn''t solve the
underlying problem of how to determine what services are running.


John

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Of course, you really should not be able to ssh into your boxes as
root.

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