Puppet

h2. Scenario 1

No [plugins] in /etc/puppet/fileserver.conf

debug: No plugins mount given; autocreating with default permissions

On client, no pluginsource in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf

<0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % ls -l
total 0
<0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % sudo puppetd -t --noop --no-factsync --pluginsync --tags sdkljfh
info: Retrieving plugin
err: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins]: Failed to retrieve current state of resource: Could not retrieve information from source(s) puppet://engpsr0170.etf.barcapetf.com/plugins
...

h2. Scenario 2

[plugins] in /etc/puppet/fileserver.conf, without path

...
[plugins]
  allow *
...

info: mount[plugins]: allowing * access
<0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % ls -l
total 0
<0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % sudo puppetd -t --noop --no-factsync --pluginsync --tags sdkljfh
info: Retrieving plugin
err: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins]: Failed to retrieve current state of resource: Could not retrieve information from source(s) puppet://engpsr0170.etf.barcapetf.com/plugins

h2. Scenario 3

Fall back to using an old-style mount On Master, in /etc/puppet/fileserver.conf:

...
[oldplugins]
  path /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  allow *
...

On Client, In /etc/puppet/puppet.conf

...
[puppetd]
...
    pluginsource = puppet:///oldplugins/

0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % sudo puppetd -t --noop --no-factsync --pluginsync --tags sdkljfh
<1> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % ls -l
total 0
<0> sa_dewha@engpsr0171.etf.barcapetf.com (0 jobs)
 /var/lib/puppet/plugins
  % sudo puppetd -t --noop --no-factsync --pluginsync --tags sdkljfh
info: Retrieving plugin
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet]/ensure: created
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/parser]/ensure: created
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/parser/functions]/ensure: created
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/parser/functions/BCutilities.rb]/ensure: defined 'content' as '{md5}3cdb1b3a2c9377f2b06b8a3d1eb99f7d'
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/parser/functions/allstringvarsdefined.rb]/ensure: defined 'content' as '{md5}57c37a60a75dfca8918596e07ba200dd'
...
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/provider/sysctl]/ensure: created
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/provider/sysctl/parsed.rb]/ensure: defined 'content' as '{md5}d2286da60de06702b4f4088aea013271'
...
notice: /File[/var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/type/sysctl.rb]/ensure: defined 'content' as '{md5}2dbd57c096f29efa11a4c041af6e41ef'
...
info: Loading downloaded plugin /var/lib/puppet/plugins/puppet/type/sysctl.rb
info: Redefining sysctl in Puppet::Type
...

It doesn’t seem to be successfully loading my type; that’s another ticket.

For now, I’m going to bump this. It’s just a logging issue, it doesn’t actually hurt anything, and what I would basically say is, don’t enable pluginsync if you don’t have any plugins.

It’s actually a pretty hard problem to solve, because we’re using standard fileserving. We almost need to do a pre-query to see if there are plugins, and only then do the full synchronization.

FWIW turning off pluginsync on the server doesn’t fix this (at least on my system using 0.25.1 from Debian backports it doesn’t). I guess each client must be updated as well. I decided to just suppress it in my log monitoring tool instead.

Should we perhaps change the severity of the warning in the meantime?

We can’t – it’s the general framework behaving in a general way, and we really can’t suppress it without special-casing a ton of stuff.

I’ve looked into it pretty deeply, and either we use general services or we don’t. I mean, we could spend two days making it so people who have pluginsync enabled but don’t use plugins don’t get any warnings, but… is it so hard to just not use pluginsync until you have plugins?

For what it’s worth, there is a work around:

In 0.25.4 if any one of your modules simply has an empty “lib” directory, the warning will disappear.

The automatic fileserver “plugins” mount point needs something, even a blank directory, to prevent the warning.

In any of your modules on your modulepath just create a blank lib directory and this will go away.