changing a few things in our host mgmt tools

[seth vidal]

On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 09:16 -0600, Clint Savage wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 9:04 AM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >  some thoughts have been slowly coalescing in my head about how we're
> > managing our boxes/services and I have some suggestions I've passed by
> > various folks but I wanted to check them out with everyone:
> >
> >
> > 1. puppetd sucks..... memory. Right now we have puppetd running on every
> > box and it wakes up every half hour and runs itself. This is fine but in
> > the time where it is not doing anything it just eats memory for no good
> > reason. I'd like to suggest we move to a cron-driven model instead of
> > puppetd. I'd write a simple cron job that runs every half hour to run
> > puppetd, if a lock file is not found. Pretty straightforward, of
> > course.
> 
> I'd be happy to help get this going.  I've set up puppet a few times
> in this fashion now and it's pretty easy to do.

I have a script now ($RANDOM is my friend) - I was just going to drop it
into a path and put a crontab into /etc/cron.d/

is there more to it than that?

> 2. monitoring if puppetd has run properly:
> >   two things we want to know about puppet runs:
> >   a. when they last happened per-box
> >   b. if they fell over in a horrible way.
> 
> It might be overkill, but puppet dashboard is pretty nice.  It's a web
> interface, kind of like a nagios for puppet, telling you exactly the
> things you want to know above.  Plus, it has some pretty graphs :)  It
> runs on cron jobs too.  I've set it up once about a year ago, pretty
> nice.  I'm sure it's improved some since then.  Again, I'd be happy to
> help set this up.

feels like overkill. I'm not partial to web interfaces, personally, b/c
to get them running and accessible on puppet.fp.o requires a fair bit of
hoop jumping and reverse proxying.

-sv