Part 1 - Basic Puppet Master Setup

Installing Puppet and Puppetmaster on the Master

As this tutorial is based on a CentOS 5.2 server we will use Fedora EPEL to install Puppet, you should first configure your system to use EPEL.

• Other options for installing puppet is documented on the wiki for Debian, Hat and CentOS, OpenBSD, OS X, Gentoo and FreeBSD

master# yum install puppet puppet-server facter
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Running Transaction
  Installing: facter                       ######################### [1/3] 
  Installing: puppet                       ######################### [2/3] 
  Installing: puppet-server                ######################### [3/3] 

Installed: puppet-server.noarch 0:0.24.4-1.el5
Dependency Installed: facter.noarch 0:1.3.8-1.el5 puppet.noarch 0:0.24.4-1.el5
Complete!

Configure DNS

In this simple tutorial we will use the default method for client machines to contact the master and that is via a CNAME in DNS for puppet

• To override this you need to set certname and server in the configuration file, refer to ConfigurationReference

You should arrange for this either through /etc/hosts or through DNS, in this example I added 'puppet' to localhost in /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1               localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.5             puppet

And to verify this worked we can use ping

master# ping puppet
PING puppet (192.168.1.5) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from puppet (192.168.1.5): icmp_seq=1 ttl=58 time=1.53 ms

--- puppet ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.539/1.539/1.539/0.000 ms

• Both the master and all clients should be able to resolve puppet

Set up the basic site configuration

When the puppetmaster needs to find the logic to apply to a client it starts to look for the manifest in a file called /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp on Red Hat based systems by default.

• You can find out where you system is looking by doing /usr/sbin/puppetmasterd --genconfig|grep "manifest ="

In theory you can put all your code in this one file, but that is not viable once your manifest becomes large so we split it out into separate directories, create the site.pp file with the following contents:

import "nodes/*.pp"
import "classes/*.pp"

And create two directories:

master# mkdir /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes /etc/puppet/manifests/classes

Set up file serving

Puppet has the ability to distribute files using an internal protocol, to enable this you should set up the file server using /etc/puppet/fileserver.conf, a very simple one is included below and should be sufficient for our current needs, you should replace the IP addresses with your own:

• Feel free to replace /srv/puppet/fileserver with a directory of your choice

[files]
  path /srv/puppet/fileserver
  allow 192.168.0.0/24
  allow 127.0.0.1

Now create the directory in question:

master# mkdir -p /srv/puppet/fileserver

Finishing off

This concludes the basic setup for a simple puppetmaster, it's low on features at the moment but we will flesh it out as we go along, specifically without any files in nodes and manifests nothing will be able to use it, but we will start putting those in place in part 2.

Your puppetmaster should now have a directory structure along these lines:

/etc/puppet/
|-- fileserver.conf
|-- manifests
|   |-- classes
|   |-- nodes
|   `-- site.pp
`-- puppet.conf

/srv/puppet/
`-- fileserver

You're now ready to start on Part 2 where we set up some basics and prepare to run our first client connection.