Puppet Issues

Some interesting issues today to resolve with Puppet.

First was an issue with obtaining the ca.pem from the master server.  This occurred as follows;

Could not request certificate: Neither PUB key nor PRIV key: header too long.

A quick goodle search came up with https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/puppet-users/IDg9Qmm3n4Q which states that the times or timezone is wrong.  Handy, but not what happened in this case.  Further investigation showed that the file system was full, which is a great reason why it wouldn't work at all.  Not being able to capture the cert.

Next a time out issue.  The bigger the puppet config the worse the system will be for being able to obtain it's catalogue in time.  To resolve this use;

--configtimeout nnn

This will tell the agent to wait longer than the default time for the server to build the catalogue.

Some helpful tips here is not to put your entire stack onto one host.