Puppet users - May 2012 - is there a Puppet facter plugin repository please ?

Hello,

We are currently evaluating Puppet and Chef on several criteria and we
have found a big difference between the amount of information
retrieved by Facter in Puppet and the amount of information retrieved
by Ohai in Chef for a same virtual machine.

There is about 2000 lines in the JSON file provided by Chef when there
is only 72 lines in the YAML file provided by Puppet.

For Chef, it is a formatted JSON so there is a certain amount of lines
because of the json hierarchy and there is too a lot of "Not
Specified" data meaning no useful data, but even comparing the raw
useful data, there''s still a big difference.

We would like to know if there are plugins / modules for Facter that
are freely available and would permit to fill the gap between Puppet
and Chef on this aspect.

Could you please give us some links on facts that are not included in
facter and would permit to retrieve more information on the nodes ?

Unless we miss some configuration or documentation from puppetlabs
which would permit to extract more facts from nodes ?

Thanks in advance for your help

Best regards,
Christophe

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Christophe,

Let me ask a question: what extra information is Ohai providing (that
Facter does not currently) that you would be using in your
manifests/cookbooks?  Usually people utilize similar bits of
Facter-provided information (operatingsystem, release version, ipaddress,
interfaces, domain, hostname, fqdn, etc...) but the other information they
want to utilize is fairly specialized to their organization (role,
environment, location, group, etc...).  In the latter case, you would need
to create custom facts to define those anyway.  I AM genuinely interested
in the information that Ohai is providing (that Facter is not) that you
find useful - we''re definitely open to providing more useful
information.

As for a fact repository, facts are provided inside modules in our Module
Forge (forge.puppetlabs.com) inside the lib/facter directory of Modules.
 Many modules contain facts, and I encourage you to check there for more
information :)

Cheers!

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 4:40 AM, Christophe L
<cl.subscription@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We are currently evaluating Puppet and Chef on several criteria and we
> have found a big difference between the amount of information
> retrieved by Facter in Puppet and the amount of information retrieved
> by Ohai in Chef for a same virtual machine.
>
> There is about 2000 lines in the JSON file provided by Chef when there
> is only 72 lines in the YAML file provided by Puppet.
>
> For Chef, it is a formatted JSON so there is a certain amount of lines
> because of the json hierarchy and there is too a lot of "Not
> Specified" data meaning no useful data, but even comparing the raw
> useful data, there''s still a big difference.
>
> We would like to know if there are plugins / modules for Facter that
> are freely available and would permit to fill the gap between Puppet
> and Chef on this aspect.
>
> Could you please give us some links on facts that are not included in
> facter and would permit to retrieve more information on the nodes ?
>
> Unless we miss some configuration or documentation from puppetlabs
> which would permit to extract more facts from nodes ?
>
> Thanks in advance for your help
>
> Best regards,
> Christophe
>
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>

-- 

Gary Larizza
Professional Services Engineer
Puppet Labs

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Hello Gary,

Thank you for your answer.

First, I should have written about "raw meaningful data" rather than
"raw
useful data" because you are right that a lot of the extra information are 
not actually useful :)

For information, the aim is not to use the information in modules, but to 
fill a CMDB system from the information extracted from Puppet or Chef.

But there are still some information not provided by puppet that we would 
need, for example:
- IPv6 of the server (we got only the IPv4)
- release date of the bios ( that can give an idea about the date of 
manufacturing of the server)
- family, vendor, speed of the CPU cores
- on linux, mounting points with size allocated and filesystem type

Actually, there may be others but I have not looked yet in details in the 
Chef file because there is too much in it ;)

About the module forge, I went there and found only two modules which looks 
related to facter
http://forge.puppetlabs.com/tags/facter

are there more modules that I have not seen ?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Best regards,
Christophe

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Hi Christophe,

The facter tag is something a user would have to use when they release
their module. There are many more custom facts on the Forge that
simply aren''t tagged. Your thread inspired me to create a feature
request for searching specifically for facts:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/14431

If you haven''t already discovered this, it''s quite easy to
create your
own custom facts for getting the information you want and we''d love to
see you upload those additions to the Forge.
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/custom_facts.html

Cheers!

--Ryan

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On Friday, May 11, 2012 11:42:52 AM UTC-7, Ryan Coleman
wrote:
>
> Hi Christophe, 
>
> The facter tag is something a user would have to use when they release 
> their module. There are many more custom facts on the Forge that 
> simply aren''t tagged. 
>
Given that the current module definitions require known locations for 
factor extensions, I find this a bit odd.
How about making the uploader autotag ''facter'' any module that
has files
under lib/facter ?
 

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On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 12:58 PM, Philip Brown <phil@bolthole.com>
wrote:
> Given that the current module definitions require known locations for
factor
> extensions, I find this a bit odd.
> How about making the uploader autotag ''facter'' any module
that has files
> under lib/facter ?
That''s precisely what I''m asking for in the Forge feature
request. It
shouldn''t be hard for us to do, it''s just not there yet. :-)

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Christophe,

I would suggest not using Puppet or Chef to pass data around
constantly that isn''t going to be used by your actual code. Instead,
you might want to set up a proper SNMP infrastructure such that you
can get all of the information that you want and poll your network
devices, etc... with the same mechanisms.

AFAIK, all of the information that you''ve asked about is natively
hooked into SNMP in most modern operating systems and relatively
easily enabled for collection.

Thanks,

Trevor

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Christophe L <cl.subscription@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello Gary,
>
> Thank you for your answer.
>
> First, I should have written about "raw meaningful data" rather
than "raw
> useful data" because you are right that a lot of the extra information
are
> not actually useful :)
>
> For information, the aim is not to use the information in modules, but to
> fill a CMDB system from the information extracted from Puppet or Chef.
>
> But there are still some information not provided by puppet that we would
> need, for example:
> - IPv6 of the server (we got only the IPv4)
> - release date of the bios ( that can give an idea about the date of
> manufacturing of the server)
> - family, vendor, speed of the CPU cores
> - on linux, mounting points with size allocated and filesystem type
>
> Actually, there may be others but I have not looked yet in details in the
> Chef file because there is too much in it ;)
>
> About the module forge, I went there and found only two modules which looks
> related to facter
> http://forge.puppetlabs.com/tags/facter
>
> are there more modules that I have not seen ?
>
> Thanks in advance for your feedback.
>
>
> Best regards,
> Christophe
>
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-- 
Trevor Vaughan
Vice President, Onyx Point, Inc
(410) 541-6699
tvaughan@onyxpoint.com

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