[Puppet Users] Re: howto trigger action on another client

jcbollinger
Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:00:17 -0000

On Jun 28, 2:36 am, Andreas Kuntzagk <andreas.kuntz...@mdc-berlin.de>
wrote:

[... I wrote:]

> > In general, facts, including custom facts, are the Puppet means for
> > providing nodes'' state details to the puppetmaster.
>
> It''s probably the "clean puppet way(tm)" to do it but to
write custom facts you
> need to learn some Ruby. Currently I''d like to avoid learning yet
another
> programming language. There are other ways the GridEngine master can test
for
> the status of the client.


It may indeed be that Puppet is not the best available mechanism for
enrolling new execution nodes into GE.  Puppet excels at managing
(semi-)permanent state details that individually are confined to a
single node.  It can certainly be applied to more general scenarios,
but as you move away from its core focus, Puppet begins to lose some
of its appeal.  In particular, if you find yourself doing complex
things with Execs then you are probably running against the grain.

As for custom facts, however, whether you would need to learn any Ruby
depends somewhat on the complexity of the fact you need.  If the fact
value can be represented as the standard output of an OS command then
you can just plug it in to the example at
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/custom_facts.html#an-example.  In
that case there is no need to understand the bit of Ruby window
dressing that interfaces the command with Facter.  Indeed, that window
dressing is much more Puppet-specific than Ruby-general anyway.


John