puppet update broken?

[Dennis J.]

On 03/12/2010 11:37 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 2:47 PM, Dennis J.<dennisml at conversis.de>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I just installed a new machine in our infrastructure but I can't get the
>> puppet package to work. I see it has recently been updated to 0.25.4 while
>> the previous version i EPEL was 0.24.8. The other machines that are still
>> running 0.24.8 are all doing fine but on the one with the new puppet version
>> I just get a "Reopening log files" in the syslog. On the other machines this
>> is followed by "Starting Puppet client version 0.24.8" but on the new one
>> nothing happens.
>
> A bad part of this our fault. We need to send out FLAG days on certain
> packages (puppet being one of them) when an update goes into testing
> and when it goes into production.
>
> A second bad part is we do not keep many old versions of our packages
> around due to limits on resources on our part.

I don't know about many versions but it would be good to have at least the 
previous version around for a potential rollback.

> Part of this is due to how puppet upstream works. Puppet only gives a
> partial guarantee for backwards compatibility between 'major' version
> upgrades (and only on the server), and the puppet recommended way of
> upgrades is always:
>
> Upgrade the server first, Upgrade the clients next.

Should this 'major' update have been put into EPEL at all if there are 
known backwards compatibility issues? That seems to be quite a risky policy 
for a distribution which most people expect to be mostly free from any 
surprises (as opposed to the faster moving desktop distros like Fedora).

Would a backup of /var/lib/puppet and /etc/puppet be sufficient when I 
attempt to update the server? I manage 50+ machines with puppet and it 
would be extremely painful to not be able to go back to a known working 
setup if 0.25.4 shows problems.

Regards,
   Dennis