[Puppet Users] Usage of puppet to deploy and configuration manage software patches

Hi,

If you should decompose them you can define them as different
classes. That however as you know will lead to an explosion of different
classes which can become pretty unmaintainable with time ...

The question is if you *should* do it this way. I don't know
so much about your system so I can't tell. We are mostly updating with
proper package management and build our software for upgrades.

Maybe if you tell us more about your system/setup, we can give you a better advice?

Best, Nikola

Hi,

if your S.O is Centos/Red-hat you can use SpaceWalk, puppet is not good for
this .

Tks


2012/11/9 Nikola Petrov <nikolavp@gmail.com>

Hi There,
Looking at your module approach, I think you are heading for quite a bit of
pain, I've found that packaging tools such as RPM are best for this kind of
task.

In my environment which is all RHEL based I (roughly) do the following:
- I have a number of YUM repositories defined and presented to the network
via HTTP
- By default, all nodes have the standard production baseline YUM
repositories enabled by default
- I use top scope variables to enable additional YUM repositories that may
contain later package versions or testing packages via the yumrepo type
- Once these additional repositories are enabled, I can then use yum update
to bring hosts up to a specific baseline of the OS or software set.
- Once I am happy with the functionality of this new repo, I can either
promote it to be the production baseline or something similar.

Here is some puppet logic that operates on the $::enable_testing_repos
value, and enables the testing repo if it is true for a host, else it is
left defined, but disabled.

yumrepo { $rhelsysupporttestingrepo :
baseurl => $rhelsysupporttestingrepourl,
descr => "TESTING System support packages",
gpgcheck => '1',
enabled => $::enable_testing_repos ? {
'true' => '1',
default => '0',
}
}



Re: Spacewalk - I've just moved my entire fleet from spacewalk / satellite
to YUM via HTTP (Apache) with repos created with createrepo, etc and find
it much faster and flexible.

Hope this is of some use.

Thanks,

K

You can do it with puppet, but it really isn't designed to do that. It's
declarative nature will make you a lot of trouble trying to implement
procedural tasks. So it would be much better to use technology that is
designed with that specific issue at mind - and that are the packaging
systems. So if you use RHEL/Fedora or derivates, by all means, you
should go with RPM and not stretch the puppet to the limits with ugly
hacks to accomplish things it isn't supposed to.