Puppet

This page is about how to install, configure, and manage Puppet. For documentation about writing Puppet code, see Puppet coding.

Puppet is the main configuration management tool to be used on the Wikimedia clusters (puppet for dummies on the blog).

puppet agent is the client daemon that runs on all servers, and manages machines with configuration information gathered from puppetmasterd.

Making changes

A short tutorial on how to get set up to propose and merge changes in Puppet can be found here: Adding_users_on_puppet

Updating operations/puppet

For security purposes, changes made to the puppet git repository are not immediately applied to nodes. In order to get approved puppet changes live on production systems, you must fetch and review the changes one last time on ''a puppetmaster system''. This final visual check is crucial to making sure that malicious puppet changes don't sneak their way in, as well as making sure that you don't deploy something that wasn't ready to be deployed.

The operations/puppet repository is hosted on the puppetmasters (currently puppetmaster1001and puppetmaster2001) at /var/lib/git/operations/puppet. This will automatically update all other puppetmasters as well.

"puppet-merge" is a custom wrapper script designed to formalize the merge steps while making it possible to review actual diffs of submodules when they change. When there are submodule changes, puppet-merge will clone the /var/lib/git/operations/puppet working copy to a tmp directory, do the merge and submodule update, and then show a manual file diff between /var/lib/git/operations/puppet and the temporary clone. This allows for explicit inspection of exactly what is about to be done to the codebase, even when there are submodule changes.

 $ sudo puppet-merge
 # diff is shown...
 Merge these changes? (yes/no)? yes
 Merging a4678c710573006249e86d311198b94cc3889382...
 git merge --ff-only a4678c710573006249e86d311198b94cc3889382
 Updating 8b0e19d..a4678c7
 Fast-forward
  files/puppet/puppet-merge |    3 ++-
  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 From https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/operations/puppet
    8b0e19d..a4678c7  production -> origin/production
 Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
  files/puppet/puppet-merge |    3 ++-
  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
 Running git clean to clean any untracked files.
 git clean -dffx
 HEAD is now a4678c710573006249e86d311198b94cc3889382.

Once the changes are updated, they will be put into place by puppet on whatever relevant nodes during the next puppet run.

One might notice that two puppet-merge wrappers exist: A Bash-based one and a Python-based one. The Bash wrapper is intended for use by a real user while the Python wrapper is for automation (e.g. via the git-puppet user). Eventually, only the Python wrapper will exist.

Updating labs/private.git

By default this is not necessary. When puppet-merge is invoked by a user, and --labsprivate is not specified, it will check for labs/private changes and merge them if necessary.

If you wish to only merge labs/private changes in cloud VMs, invoke the script with the --labsprivate flag.

user@puppetmaster1001:~ $ sudo puppet-merge --labsprivate
Fetching new commits from https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/labs/private
remote: Counting objects: 1746, done
remote: Finding sources: 100% (40/40)
remote: Getting sizes: 100% (8/8)
remote: Total 40 (delta 26), reused 40 (delta 26)
Unpacking objects: 100% (40/40), done.
From https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/labs/private
   3c06697..1c2f71a  master     -> origin/master
[..]

Noop test run on a node

You can do a dry run of your changes using:

# puppet agent --noop --test --debug

This will give you (among other things) a list of all the changes it would make.

Trigger a run on a node

Just run:

# puppet agent --test

Puppet agent

Installation of the puppet service is handled via our automated installation. No production ready machines should have puppet manually installed.

If you're not following the Server Lifecycle/Reimage procedure (STRONGLY DISCOURAGED), initial root login can be done from any puppetmaster frontend or cumin master hosts (cumin1001.eqiad.wmnet, cumin2002.codfw.wmnet) with sudo /usr/local/sbin/install_console HOSTNAME. The script uses /root/.ssh/new_install ssh key and thus works also while debian-installer is running during PXE install. The key is automatically removed at the first puppet run.

Communication with the puppetmaster server is over encrypted SSL and with signed certificates. To sign the certificate of the newly installed machine on the puppetmaster server, log in on the current ca_server (to find out: sudo puppet config print --section agent ca_server) and run:

puppet cert sign clienthostname

To check the list of outstanding, unsigned certificates, use:

puppet cert list

Reinstalls

When a server gets reinstalled, the existing certs/keys on the puppetmaster will not match the freshly generated keys on the client, and puppet will not work. Our automated reimaging script wmf-auto-reimage(-host) should be used in every case.

The manual steps would be as follow:

• Before a server runs puppet for the first time (again), on the puppetmaster host, the following command should be run to erase all history of a server:

puppet node clean clienthostname

However, if this is done after puppet agent has already run and therefore has already generated new keys, this is not sufficient. To fix this situation on the !!! client !!!, use the following command to erase the newly generated keys/certificates:

find /var/lib/puppet -name "$(hostname -f)*" -exec rm -f {} \;

SANs for puppet certs

If you want to add SANs to your puppet certificate, you can do that with the following:

1. Make sure that puppet is already successfully running on the instance whose certificates need to have SANs added
2. Set the profile::base::puppet::dns_alt_names hiera key to a comma-separated list of domains you'd like to be in the SAN. See here for docs.
3. Run puppet a couple of times to make sure that /etc/puppet/puppet.conf has a line under [agent] setting dns_alt_names
4. On the puppetmaster, revoke the current certificate for the host with puppet cert clean <fqdn-of-host>
5. On the client, clean out all the certs with rm -rf /var/lib/puppet/ssl
6. Run puppet agent -tv on the client to regenerate a certificate and submit it to the puppetmaster for signing. This CSR will have the SANs you specified in step 2 in it.
7. On the server, sign the CSR with puppet cert --allow-dns-alt-names sign <fqdn-of-host>.

Done!

Misc

Sometimes you want to purge info for a host from the puppet db. The below will do it for you:

puppet node clean fqdn

on the puppet master. All references, i.e. the host entry and all facts going with it, will be tossed. It is important to note that the ssl certificate will be tossed as well, so you will need to re-generate and sign a new cert after the fact.

Maintenance

When performing some maintenance on a host that requires puppet to be disabled, it can be done with (the current $SUDO_USER will be automatically appended to the message):

sudo disable-puppet "some reason - T12345"

To re-enable it run (the current $SUDO_USER will be automatically appended to the message):

sudo enable-puppet "some reason - T12345"

To re-enable it and contextually run puppet run:

sudo run-puppet-agent -e "some reason - T12345"

Puppetmaster

As of late 2016 we have a 3-layer infrastructure for our puppet masters:

• Each main datacenter has its own 3-layer infrastructure, linked with the one in the other.
• The first layer is the puppetmaster frontend, running on one machine per DC. It runs on port 8140 and only accepts connections via HTTPS, and proxies them to backends for everything besides static content. Some specific requests like certificate signing requests and requests for volatile data will be redirected to the local backend (see below) if the server is the current designated master. If it's not, requests are proxied to the frontend on the current master.
• The second layer are the puppetmaster backends, which are listening on port 8141 and running the puppetmaster application via apache/mod_passenger. One instance of the backend is also installed on the frontend servers. This is what does most of the server-side work.
• The third layer is puppetDB, where the backend application will both store agent-provided facts, compiled catalogs and resources; it can also be queried by the masters in order to fetch information (from e.g. exported resources, and more) about the nodes. The puppetDB architecture is pretty complex in itself, so it is explained in more detail below.

PuppetDB

PuppetDB is a clojure application that exposes a somewhat-RESTful interface to retrieve information about puppet catalog, resources, facts. At the time of writing, we're using puppetDB version 2.3, which is the last to be compatible with puppet 3.x. PuppetDB uses Postgres to store its data.

A web frontend for PuppetDB is available at puppetboard.wikimedia.org

Our PuppetDB infrastructure is built for scaling-out and high availability as follows:

• Each datacenter has one puppetdb server, that at the moment hosts both the clojure application and the Postgres server.
• Queries from the puppetmasters in one datacenter normally flow to the local puppetdb application
• Read-only queries go to the local postgres server; writes are done by connecting (over SSL) to whichever postgres instance is the master.
• Postgres instances are set up in a primary/read-only replica configuration

Debugging

It might at times be useful to see the queries being served by puppetdb. That can be done by inspecting the HTTP requests received by puppetdb on, for instance, puppetdb1001.eqiad.wmnet:

sudo httpry 'tcp port 8080' -i lo -m GET
[...]
2018-04-10 10:59:58     127.0.0.1       127.0.0.1       >       GET     localhost:8080  /pdb/query/v4/resources?query=[%22and%22,[%22=%22,%22type%22,%22Class%22],[%22=%22,%22title%22,%22Profile::Cumin::Target%22],[%22=%22,%22exported%22,false]]   HTTP/1.0        -       -

To get the result of the query above, replacing %22 with ":

curl -G localhost:8080/pdb/query/v4/resources --data-urlencode 'query=["and",["=","type","Class"],["=","title","Profile::Cumin::Target"],["=","exported",false]]'

check_puppet_run_changes

This check queries the puppet db to find hosts that perform a change on every puppet run. When the check alerts it should show you a list of all hosts detected. The quickest way to see the failures is to go to the node's page in Puppetboard (https://puppetboard.wikimedia.org/node/$FQDN) and check the list of last Puppet runs and look at the changes on each of them clicking on the changed blue button. The other way is log in to the machine and manually run puppet a few times to see which resource(s) is trying to make a change on every puppet run. Some common issues that have been observed are:

• Attempting to absent a directory without using force => true
• Installing a package via its alias.
• Service is started by puppet but silently fails shortly after

node cleanup

In case there are stale entries in puppetdb for servers that no longer exists, you can cleanup the node using these commands in the puppetmaster:

user@puppetmaster1001:~ $ sudo puppet node clean $FQDN
[...]
user@puppetmaster1001:~ $ sudo puppet node deactivate $FQDN
Submitted 'deactivate node' for $FQDN with UUID 3064c051-5435-xxxx-xxxx-89e5e8359e7c

If what needs cleanup is on client side only (for example, if a reimage was aborted after the certificate has been revoked already), you can do:

user@client_node2002:~ $ sudo find /var/lib/puppet/ssl -name $FQDN.pem -delete

And on next run a new certificate will be automatically generated.

Micro Service

puppetdb runs a small micros service which exposes a limited set of the puppetdb DB API to trusted hosts. This service is configured with a dns discovery which points to both the codfw and eqiad puppetdb servers and as such can be depooled using conftool.

The service is currently used by:

• netbox
• pki
• cuminpriv

Operations

Pool / depool a backend

Puppet master backends are controlled by hieradata/common/puppetmaster.yaml, marking a given backend as offline by adding offline: true to the entry will depool it from apache from the frontends. Removing the worker entry altogether will also remove said backend from e.g. firewall rules so make sure a backend is not receiving traffic before removing the entry. Removing the entry will also prevent the backend from getting puppet-merge updates pushed, so useful when e.g. a backend is expected to be offline for long periods of time.

When pooling a new backend, the recommended procedure is to first add the entry with offline: true to allow the backend to e.g. receive updates from puppet-merge, be granted access to puppetdb, etc. After verifying the backend is working as expected and puppet has ran, remove the offline: true entry.

Pool / depool a frontend

Puppetmaster frontends are found by agents via the (unqualified) puppet DNS name, thus there's different records for each site under wmnet plus wikimedia.org.

To pool a frontend into service it is sufficient to change one/more DNS CNAMEs for puppet to point to it (e.g. 421060).

Puppetmaster frontends also serve etcd configuration pulled from etcd itself, via the config-master virtualhost. To pool a frontend for config-master it should be present both in DNS and varnish: 421918 and 421919 respectively.

Usually these activities of pooling/depooling are related to reimages, see this Phabricator task with a detailed description of such reimage.

Debugging

Using

# puppet agent --test --trace --debug

You get maximum output from puppet.

You can see a list of classes that are being included on a given puppet host, by checking the file /var/lib/puppet/state/classes.txt.

With --evaltrace, puppet will shows the resources as they are being evaluated:

# puppet agent -tv --evaltrace
info: Class[Apt::Update]: Starting to evaluate the resource
info: Class[Apt::Update]: Evaluated in 0.00 seconds
info: /Stage[first]/Apt::Update/Exec[/usr/bin/apt-get update]: Starting to evaluate the resource
notice: /Stage[first]/Apt::Update/Exec[/usr/bin/apt-get update]/returns: executed successfully
info: /Stage[first]/Apt::Update/Exec[/usr/bin/apt-get update]: Evaluated in 16.24 seconds
info: Class[Apt::Update]: Starting to evaluate the resource
info: Class[Apt::Update]: Evaluated in 0.01 seconds
...

Most of the puppet configuration parameters can be passed as long options (aka evaltrace can be passed as --evaltrace).

Errors

Occassionally you may see puppet fill up disks, and then result in yaml errors during puppet runs. If so, you can run the following on the puppet master, but do so very, very carefully:

 cd /var/lib/puppet && find . -name "*<servername>*.yaml -delete

Check .erb template syntax

"ERB files are easy to syntax check. For a file mytemplate.erb, run"

erb -x -T '-' mytemplate.erb | ruby -c

(puppet templating)

Icinga alerts

check_client_bucket_large_file

This check fires if large files have been found in the client bucket directory (/var/lib/puppet/clientbucket/). Files are copied to this directory when they are being managed in some way by puppet. puppet uses the copy to disable diffs as well as a backup (not to be relied upon). Puppet is not great at managing large files in general but especially if it needs to disable. As such we should avoid managing large files with puppet at all. however if you really do need to you should:

• place the file in the volatile directory directly on the puppetmaster and not store them
• ensure you set backup => false on the file resource

you should be able find the large files using the following one liner:

$ find  /var/lib/puppet/clientbucket -type f -size +100M | while read line ; do  cat "$(dirname ${line})"/paths ; done | uniq

Troubleshooting

puppet master spewing 500s

It might happen that there's a storm of puppet failures, this is usually due to the clients not being able to talk to the master(s). If that happens first identify the failing puppet master, there should be a nagios check on HTTP checking for 200s. Once on the puppet master check that apache children are present, in particular the mod_passenger's passenger-spawn-server and that there "master" processes running, the stdout/stderr are connected to /var/log/apache2/error.log so that will provide some guidance, if e.g. passenger-spawn-server crashed it would be sufficient to restart apache.

puppet-merge fails to sync on secondary

Sometimes puppet-merge might fail to sync on the secondary for whatever reason (see also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T128895). This is easily fixed by ssh into the server where the command failed and running:

 sudo puppet-merge

force puppet agent to use a specific puppetmaster

If you have multiple puppet masters, maybe using different versions, you may want to force an agent to use a specific master.

See this example using boron and a test puppetmaster:

 root@boron:~# puppet agent --test --server puppetmaster.test.eqiad.wmnet

Where boron has in /etc/hosts the puppetmaster frontend (puppetmaster1001):

10.64.16.73 puppetmaster.test.eqiad.wmnet

And the puppetmaster frontend itself has the server you'd like to test in its hiera settings as profile::puppetmaster::frontend::test_servers

source: gerrit:415299 (godog)

Git is down (and requires a puppet change to put it back)

//TODO

Private puppet

Our main puppet repo is publicly visible and accepts (via gerrit review) volunteer submissions. Certain information (passwords, keys, etc.) cannot be made public, and lives in a separate, private puppet repository.

The private repository is stored on whichever server is the ca_master (sudo puppet config print --section agent ca_server) in /srv/private. It is not managed by gerrit or subject to review; changes are made there by logging in, editing and committing directly on the puppetmaster. Changes to /srv/private are distributed to puppetmasters automatically via a post-commit hook. The puppet master pulls private data from /var/lib/git/operations/private but you don't need to edit there, it should be synced automatically by the post-commit hook in /srv/private.

To properly attribute a change to a user, commit under your own user with sudo, e.g. "sudo git commit -a" or use a "sudo -i bash" shell.

The data in the private repository is highly sensitive and should not ever be copied onto your local machine or to anywhere outside of a puppetmaster system.

Nowadays, most things in the private repo should be class parameters defined with Puppet Hiera. Those reside under private/hieradata and have the big advantage they don't need to get replicated in a second repository (see below).

Public (fake) private puppet repo

In order to satisfy puppet dependencies while retaining security, there is also a 'labs private' repo which the labs puppetmaster uses in place of the actual, secure private repo. The labs private repo lives on Gerrit and consists mainly of disposable keys and dummy passwords. In the case of hieradata in the private repo, in most cases labs can be happy with class defaults or with some data you can put in labs.yaml in the public hiera repository.

See also how to merge patches to this repo.

Puppet CA

The server hosting the private git repo (see above) also hosts the Puppet CA and runs puppet-master in "CA mode", in other words the endpoint that agents use to ask for signatures and obtain their certs. Also the host where puppet cert commands are able to operate.

Failover

When doing maintenance on the puppet CA host it is necessary to failover the CA onto another puppetmaster frontend. Make sure the change is announced a little ahead of time to ops@lists.wikimedia.org to give folks the heads up.

1. Disable puppet across the fleet cumin -p 95 -b 100 '*' "disable-puppet 'temporarily disabled for puppet ca relocation - USERNAME'"
2. Ensure rsync/git (ca, private and volatile) destinations are up to date on the destination frontend.
   1. /var/lib/puppet/server/ssl/ca
   2. /var/lib/puppet/volatile
   3. /srv/private/
3. Make backup copies of /var/lib/puppet in case of disaster
4. Flip puppetmaster::ca_server in puppet to point to the new host.
5. Enable puppet on the old CA host, verify apache config now ProxyPass to the new host.
6. Enable puppet on the new CA host, verify puppet-master can start and serve requests.
7. Run puppet agent on a few canary hosts to check all is well.
8. Reenable puppet across the fleet cumin -p 70 -b 100 '*' "enable-puppet 'temporarily disabled for puppet ca relocation - USER'"

See also bug T189891 for a task detailing a puppet CA failover.

Renew agent certificate

Agent certificates by default last for 5 years as such any servers that last that long will need the puppet agent certificate renewed. use the sre.puppet.renew-cert to renew the certificate

$ sudo cookbook sre.puppet.renew-cert sretest1002.eqiad.wmnet
sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
START - Cookbook sre.puppet.renew-cert
Scheduling downtime on Icinga server alert1001.wikimedia.org for hosts: sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
Disabling Puppet with reason "Renew puppet certificate - jbond@cumin1001" on 1 hosts: sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
Deleting local Puppet certificate on 1 hosts: sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
Generating a new Puppet certificate on 1 hosts: sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
Generated CSR for host sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet: F3:2C:B6:79:E1:BE:FB:4B:56:7E:EA:84:3E:0B:6A:FC:F9:D5:49:EE:86:8D:F9:7F:D5:53:33:BA:2B:9F:83:37
Signing CSR for sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet with fingerprint F3:2C:B6:79:E1:BE:FB:4B:56:7E:EA:84:3E:0B:6A:FC:F9:D5:49:EE:86:8D:F9:7F:D5:53:33:BA:2B:9F:83:37
Running Puppet with args --enable "Renew puppet certificate - jbond@cumin1001" --quiet on 1 hosts: sretest1001.eqiad.wmnet
END (PASS) - Cookbook sre.puppet.renew-cert (exit_code=0)

If you reached this page from Icinga and you want to know the list of hosts to renew, you have two ways:

• Click on the Icinga alert to expand it and you should see the complete message, containing the hosts list.
• Execute the Nagios check directly on the puppetmaster (something like /usr/local/lib/nagios/plugins/nrpe_check_puppetca_expired_certs /var/lib/puppet/server/ssl/ca/signed 2419200 604800, but check the actual/up-to-date values on puppet first).

puppet git submodules

Some puppet modules are managed as git submodules for maximizing pain and frustration of the developer; the fact it also allows episodic code sharing between production puppet and other environments (e.g. vagrant, third parties) is a plus.

troubleshooting

If submodules need to get merged into the main puppet.git repo, then there's need for a manual cleanup or git pull will fail with

 error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by checkout:

thus you'll need to remove whichever modules/SUBMODULE files were there and try pulling again.

Todo

• More secure certificate signing
• Better, more automated version control
• Better tools for adding/maintaining node definitions

tickets

some selected "puppetize" tickets that are open:

• T80340 puppetize: contacts.wikimedia.org
• RT4082 puppetize office servers ?

More information

• Puppet coding/Testing
• language description and tutorial
• general puppet documentation
• autogenerated list of all puppet resource types
• "puppet errors explained"
• Help:Standalone puppetmaster