Puppet users - Jan 2012 - stored configs - array sort order

Hi,

When using stored configs with exported resources, I''m getting an odd
sort
order for arrays. For example, I have the following resource exported by
all nodes ;

@@sshkey { "${::fqdn}_dsa":
  host_aliases =>
["$::fqdn","$::hostname","$::hostip"],
  type         => dsa,
  key          => $::sshdsakey,
}

These resources are collected by a master server ;

class ssh::knownhosts {
  Sshkey <<| |>> { ensure => present, }
}

Now, on every puppet run on the master server, I get the following change ;

      host_aliases changed [''172.20.65.11'',
''rt'', ''rt.creditlink.com.au'']
to ''rt 172.20.65.11 rt.creditlink.com.au''
/Stage[main]/Ssh::Knownhosts/Sshkey[rt.creditlink.com.au_dsa]/host_aliases


So these are effectively the same, but in the wrong order. However, if I
run the puppet agent in the foreground on the master host, the sort order
appears correct.

In my efforts to correct this, I''ve changed collation on the MySQL
database
from latin1 to utf8_general_ci (which involved a full dump & load).
I''ve
also checked environment of the puppet agent on the master server ;

root     30357  0.2  1.8  70844 56032 ?        Ssl  11:31   0:10
/usr/bin/ruby /usr/sbin/puppetd PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin PWD=/
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHLVL=2 _=/usr/sbin/puppetd

So, i''d expect sort order to be controlled by LC_COLLATE, which should
take
the value of LANG (en_US.UTF-8). This should result in numerics occuring
before alphabetic characters.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can fix or debug this?

Thanks,
Grant

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On Jan 17, 5:34 pm, Grant Byers <grant.by...@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]
> So, i''d expect sort order to be controlled by LC_COLLATE, which
should take
> the value of LANG (en_US.UTF-8). This should result in numerics occuring
> before alphabetic characters.

Me, I would expect the order of array elements to be the same on the
collecting node as it was on the exporting node.  In fact, I would
file a bug report if I could confirm that that was not reliably so,
but I''m not convinced that''s what''s happening to you.

If indeed you get the specified change messages on *every* Puppet run
on the master server, then that suggests the problem is with the
Sshkey resource.  Otherwise, you should get the change message only
once, when the master server is updated to match the collected order,
*whatever that is*.  The alias order should always match after that,
whether it''s the one you expected or not.

I suspect instead that Sshkey is doing some funny and inconsistent
sorting of its host_aliases.  Perhaps sometimes it stores them in a
hash and later reading them out in hash order.  It smells like an
unsuccessful (or regressed) attempt at order-independent aliases
comparison.


John

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