Installing the Puppet Client and using the site.pp

In an earlier video we setup a basic Puppet Server on openSUSE 11.4. Now we will setup the client on openSUSE and configure the basic puppet manifest, site.pp. The site puppet policy must exist in the server’s manifest directory for the clients to know what to do. Each time this file or other files are edited relating with the Puppet Server it must be restarted. Installing the agent on openSUSE is easy, zypper in puppet. With it installed we need to check that we can access the server, usually we will create an alias in DNS called “puppet” to point to our server. We should always check the ownership of the directory /var/lib/puppet, I like the ownership to be puppet.puppet. To connect to the server we need to have our client SSL certificates signed, puppetd –test from the client will send the request. On the server, puppetca –sign “client.example.com” will sign the request. To view requests that are waiting to be signed, puppetca –list. Now we are ready to create the site.pp. In this video it will be basic but it will demonstrate how we can centralize server management and ensure ssh is running, root login is denied and that changes to the ssh configuration will result in a restart of ssh. Powerful stuff from the people at Puppet labs.