Known issues in Puppet on Solaris 11.2

Update 25th Dec 2014: With the latest Solaris SRU (11.2.5.5.0) the important bugs which are listened here, are fixed for me. Also Puppet, Facter and Hiera are now shipped in a modern version.

With 11.2, Puppet is shipped for the first time directly with Solaris. I think it is a quite good first release, but of course not yet perfect. Puppet itself is open source software and Oracle also published all patches and Puppet types under the CDDL, so you would have the option to maintain your own build.

The huge open source community is an important part of Puppet, maybe the most important. But with Solaris you have the additional advantage that you have this open source software also covered under your usual Oracle Premier Support. With no additional cost!

So if you identify a bug in the Puppet package, please raise a Service Request (SR) via Oracle Premier Support! According my experience the Solaris developers listen to their users. Especially if you provide your feedback via a SR, then you are even implicitly a paying customer. It makes also sense to communicate your interest to a known bug, because if a bug is a pain for several users, fixing the bug becomes more important for the Solaris developers.

Therefore, I am documenting here the bugs I faced so far and how I worked around them:

General: Old versions

Puppet moves very fast and there are often new releases. Only time will tell, how well Oracle can keep the version of Puppet and Facter new and stable enough to satisfy enterprise customers and users which require the new features. New releases need weeks to months until they pass the Solaris QA phase. Personally I raise a SR, when I really need a feature/fix which is already available in the upstream project.

Current versions in 11.2.5.5.0:

  • Puppet: 3.4.1 3.6.2
  • Facter: 1.6.18 2.1.0

Bug: svccfg provider verification/idempotency issues

If you use the svccfg provider, it can happen that the SMF properties get changed with every Puppet run. Because there are some verification bugs in the provider.

  • Bug: #19278382
  • Solution: Not yet delivered to the support repository. But the bug is already fixed and Oracle QA team is testing it. Update to 11.2.4.6.0
  • Workaround: It seems the fix was already open sourced. If you cannot wait until the fix gets released to the support repo, you can fetch the open source “solaris” module from java.net. For me the fix is working.

Bug: SMF stencil /etc/puppet/puppet.conf not written

If you are setting up the Agent or the Master for the first time with SMF properties it can happen that the puppet.conf is not written. I think it is a bug in the SMF stencils framework, not in Puppet.

  • Solution: Not yet delivered, but Oracle is working on the issue.
  • Workaround: Restart the instance, with: svcadm enable puppet:agent ; svcadm restart -s puppet:agent

Bug: Hiera not available from pkg.oracle.com

Out of the box you can’t use hiera on the Puppet Master, you will get the following errors in /var/log/puppet/puppet-master.log

2014-08-11 07:48:47 +0000 Puppet (err): Could not autoload puppet/parser/functions/hiera: cannot load such file -- hiera
2014-08-11 07:48:47 +0000 Puppet (err): Could not autoload puppet/parser/functions/hiera: cannot load such file -- hiera on node testserver1.example.com
2014-08-11 07:48:47 +0000 Puppet (err): Could not autoload puppet/parser/functions/hiera: cannot load such file -- hiera on node testserver1.example.com
  • Bug: #19509458
  • Solution: Not yet delivered to the support repository. But hiera is already added to Solaris and Oracle QA team is testing it. Update to 11.2.4.6.0 and pkg install hiera
  • Workaround: Install the upstream ruby gem on the Puppet Master: # gem install hiera

Just ping me if you need help to report a new bug, which is blocking you.

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