Some posts ago I wrote that I was busy to find out how a FreeBSD machine can be PXE-ed from a Linux server. Well, I found that some time ago, but I didn't have the time to type it here, yet. Well, as always, once you know how it's done, it's quite simple. But because a lot of the FreeBSD documentation is very old (talking about FreeBSD 4, 5 and 6) it takes some time to find it all.
In my previous post I stipulated that I was PXE booting FreeBSD. Well this works and I will come back on that. But for the configuration I want to run Puppet. Nice and easy config management.
On my server I run Puppet from source. This because the server is a CentOS box with a very old Ruby and Puppet. So I decided to run the Puppet client from source as well. Getting the git repo is easy enough and installing Puppet should not be to hard.
Well, well, how wrong have I been. Every time I update the Puppet client or server something breaks. And I do mean every time.
First it started with not parsing templates correctly. A couple of hours of
debugging solved that, but then Puppet started crying with " Error 400 on
SERVER: No support for http method POST". W.T.F. does it mean. This somehow
got solved, but then the templates broke again. The Puppetlabs site stated (as
always) to update to the newest version. So I did. And the template error was
back again, but now it was a different one: "Failed to parse template
issue/issue.erb: undefined method 'first' for
"/etc/puppet/modules/issue/templates/issue.erb:19:in". Tinkering around for 4
(yes four!) hours solved this one (I can hardly remember what I tried, but I
can assure you that I have seen all sites about Puppet that exist on the
Inernet. Including the ones about handpuppets). And then I got the 400 error
again. Running in debug mode doesn't help either, so I'm rather stuck. Man, do
I hate this type of behaviour. Be stable or go away! I now completely had it
with diving into Puppet sources to find the culpritt. If they are still seeking
for a miracle for Pope John Paul II, maybe a stable Puppet client would be a
good idea.
I'm getting rather fed up with this stuff. Ths way I'll never be able to update a server and be sure it will work. Maybe CFEngine3 is a better option!
At the moment I'm busy PXE booting a FreeBSD server of a Linux (Ubuntu) machine. I've got that running and now I only need to autoinstall Puppet to perform the configuration.
I'll keep you posted.
