I'm using Puppet Dashboard as my ENC and I'm not sure how to reference or use class and group classifications from /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp
.
I have two groups defined in the dashboard: CentOS6
and SLES11
. What should my site.pp look like if I want to include a certain list of modules in the CentOS6
group and a certain list of modules in the SLES11
group?
I'm trying to do something like this:
# /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp
node basenode {
include hosts
include ssh::server
include ssh::client
include authentication
include sudo
include syslog
include mail
}
node 'CentOS6' inherits basenode {
include profile
}
node 'SLES11' inherits basenode {
include usrmounts
}
I have OS-specific case statements within my modules, but there are some modules that will only be applied to a certain distro. So I suppose I have two questions:
- Is this the best way to apply modules/resources in an OS-specific manner? Or does the above make you want to vomit?
- Regardless of #1, I'm still curious as how to reference classes, groups, and nodes from Dashboard within my manifests. I've read the External Nodes doc, but I'm not seeing how they correspond to manifests.
Thanks all.
Best Answer
You are on the right track with the External Node Classifier. It is a bit difficult to wrap your head around, but one you get it working you will never look back and I cannot recommend doing it strongly enough. I went to the puppet IRC room when i had trouble and they helped me get mine working.
Applying different modules based on OS is fine. I run a 300+ node environment with BSD and RHEL and we do it. Instead of having the the OS be a node, we have it as own class because . So instead of "node OS inherits basenode", we do have the ENC pass back something like this:
...etc
how you do it depends on how you want your inheritance to work, if you want to modify the things in basenode depending on operating system, then having OS inherit basenode is the right way to go.
TLDR, what you are doing is okay, and look into ENC's because they make life easier.
EDIT: 2. I dont use Dashboard so I dont know.