Homo-Adminus Blog - Latest Comments in Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

Phil — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:34:53 -0000

Yes, there are bugs in Ruby that cause problems with puppet...

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/Frequ...

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

Ask Bjørn Hansen — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 01:25:35 -0000

Hi Robby,

Huh? Of course you can have memory leaks in a Ruby program - or something to the same effect.

I've seen them too in our install of just a few dozen servers, but a restart of the process every few months seems to be plenty to keep it in check. The benefits by far outweigh the problems. I can't imagine managing more than one server without it now.

One of the really neat things is that it makes it VASTLY easier to recreate a server when you're upgrading or replacing it.

- ask

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

robbyt — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:00:10 -0000

re: Ilya

Disclaimer: I haven't run puppet in a large install, just have done initial research...

From my understanding on the inner-workings of puppet, it's written in 100% ruby. How can a scripting language have memory leaks? Your version of Ruby may leak memory, but puppet itself cannot. It's possible that the script may have errors or may not have proper error handling that causes it to be unstable, but i seriously doubt that you're experiencing memory leaks when using puppetd.

Also, i'm not sure about what sort of file corruptions you're talking about- corrupt configuration files?

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

Ilya Martynov — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:58:24 -0000

Puppet is nice in theory. In practice we found it is quite unstable for big installations (~100 servers): there are multiple memory leak issues in both puppetmaster and puppet client, stability issues where both die from time to time and even file corruptions. These problems are being slowly fixed with each new release but right now using puppet for big installations is source of constant problems and wastes a lot of time of our sysops team. Unfortunately you don't notice these problems until you get many servers to manage; on smaller installations it seems to work without problems (or at least they happen less often). In our case number of servers we manage increased slowly so we felt into the trap and now rely on puppet too much so it is quite late to change.

If you start afresh I'd take a look on cfengine: it is not as flexible and nice as puppet but probably is more stable simply because it is more old. In the long run puppet will be probably ok too as it is being developed actively but right now it is in "beta" state.

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

Scoundrel — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 19:24:05 -0000

2DM: No, it works on backbone interface for me. First thing I did was assigning puppet master machine a name like puppet.local and adding an appropriate record to /etc/hosts. Then I've specified this name in /etc/puppetmasterd.conf:


[puppetmasterd]
reports = store,rrdgraph,tagmail,log
certname = puppet.local

Re: Puppet - Admin’s Best Friend

DM — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:45:17 -0000

To make it work together should I have external IP on client machine? Can't make it work with certificates.