Facter is Puppet’s component for discovering information about the hardware and the operating system where the Puppet agents runs. The many auto-discovered variables (“facts”) are convenient, but facter is also a potential source for slow puppet agent executions. This post shows some tricks for troubleshooting the performance of facter.
Puppet and SMF in Solaris 11.2
In a former post I covered already my enthusiasm for Puppet support in Solaris 11.2. But what does it really mean? Is Puppet now the strategic systems management framework for all the Solaris stuff? In my opinion this is definitely not the case. The Solaris developers invested many years into good base technologies for systems management like the “Service Management Facility” (SMF). And with new Solaris releases, more and more systems configuration moves into SMF, into so called “SMF properties”. For example since Solaris 11 the DNS servers need to be configured in SMF properties and no longer in /etc/resolv.conf.
So if Puppet can talk to SMF the full power of SMF is also available in Puppet. In this post I will show how the managing of SMF in Puppet is possible in Solaris 11.2.