Stupid Puppet Trick: Agreeing to the Sun Java License with Debconf Preseeds and Puppet

I had a user ask for Java to be installed on the cluster systems, so I started up by making a simple JRE5 module for puppet, but this first one didn’t quite work: class jre5 { package { “sun-java5-jre”: ensure => latest; } } It doesn’t work because Sun wants you to agree to its …

Obscure Puppet Error #1

(First in a series of some finite positive number, for the greater edification of Googlers everywhere.) If you get an error of err: Could not retrieve catalog: Could not parse for environment development: Syntax error at ‘Debian’ at /etc/puppet/master/manifests/os/Debian.pp:1 on a Debian.pp that only has one line of class Debian {}, just go ahead and …

The autostow is Dead, Long Live stowedpackage!

I had posted earlier about distributing stowed packages via rsync and puppet to my managed systems, but that method wasn’t quite what I wanted: There was one more file to manage outside my regular puppet manifests, and I’d have to remember to keep them both up to date and in sync. There wasn’t an easy …