Puppet Master

Efforts to set up and manage a production level puppet master in a CentOS 7 server.

Install the puppet server

rpm -Uvh https://yum.puppet.com/puppet5/puppet5-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
yum install puppetserver

If your server is limited in RAM then lower the memory dedicated for the puppet server like this in file

$ sed -i 's/2g/512m/g' /etc/sysconfig/puppetserver    
$ grep JAVA_ARGS /etc/sysconfig/puppetserver
JAVA_ARGS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Djruby.logger.class=com.puppetlabs.jruby_utils.jruby.Slf4jLogger"
$ systemctl start puppetserver
$ systemctl enable puppetserver

Restore configs from this repo to your puppet dir

After setting up the puppet master server clone this repo in the following folder

yum -y install git
cd /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/production
git init
git remote add origin [email protected]:besmirzanaj/puppet-master.git
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master master
git checkout master
git pull

And you have a working copy of the puppet master.

Remember to adjust the dns records for your nodes to connect to the puppet master. If you don't control a dns server then you can manually create host records for your puppet master in /etc/hosts like this

# cat /etc/hosts
# [ip address of puppet master] puppet
# example
# 192.168.0.222     puppet

after making sure you can ping the host "puppet" make also sure that port 8140 of puppet master is reachable from your hosts (a simple "telnet puppet 8140" can verify this) then you are ready to start deploying puppet configuration management to your hosts.

Puppet Agents

Install the puppet agent in your nodes

rpm -Uvh https://yum.puppet.com/puppet5/puppet5-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
yum install puppet-agent

First time joining a node with a puppet master

From your node run

puppet agent --test

A new certificate request has been created and sent to the puppet master. In the puppet master then verify the request of that specific hostname by:

puppet cert list

and to apprive the request:

puppet cert sign "client hostname"

Now the configurations are ready to be deployed to the node. A new "puppet agent --test" command will do.

Vagrant file

A vagrant file is provided as a test case scenario of joinig the puppet masters and auto applying the configuration. Notice that for this to work an autosign rule must be in place for the puppet master certificate rules.

/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/autosign.conf

NB. This is not recommended in production, it is a huge security risk