• Puppet was used for configuration management. Puppetmaster is deployed on a CentOS server. Windows Servers on which Prognosis needs to be installed are Puppet Clients. Puppetmaster is listening on port 8140 via apache. Just for troubleshooting, once you've vpn'ed to the AF1 MCP cloud network, you can open a browser and visit https://10.192.117.11:8140

• As of now, the automation involves the following. Note that these steps involve prerequisites for the Prognosis s/w install and the Prognosis installation itself:-

• • Bring the secondary HPF disk online. Initialize the disk and format it
  • Hostname change
  • Reboot the server
• • After the reboot is complete, transfer the license, prereq. and prognosis exe, msi files to the client
  • Install the prerequisites
• • Install Prognosis

Servers involved

• Puppetmaster VM sits in the NA5 Production  MCP. Network Name - Automation
  
• The Windows Server puppet clients sit in the AP2 Production MCP. Network Name - TUC AP Regional Management Layer - Automation. Note that even though this network is in the Production AP2 MCP, it is not used in the TUC Production environment. A separate network has been built for TUC production(regional layer AP2) in the same MCP.
  

Note that these server are NOT production servers. No monitoring is done for these servers.

Puppet Installation - Pre-Install Steps

• Ensure that hostname resolution between the Puppetmaster and clients is working.
• Since there is no common DNS server(s) in this case, I manually entered the hostnames-IP mappings in the respective 'hosts' files.

Puppetmaster Hosts file

• Location: /etc/hosts
  
  Puppetmaster /etc/hosts  Expand source

Puppet Client Hosts file

• Below is an example hosts file on one of the clients(PCLOUD-AP2-1)
• Location: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
  
  Puppet client hosts file  Expand source

Check Timekeeping on Your Puppet Master Server 

The puppet master server that will be acting as the certificate authority(puppetmaster - 10.192.117.11 in this case) should have its system time set accurately. Use NTP or make sure the timezone is set correctly.
(If it doesn’t, it may mistakenly issue agent certificates from the distant past or future, which other nodes will treat as expired.)

Installing Puppet

1. Enable the Puppet Labs Package Repository 

   The newest versions of Puppet can be installed from the yum.puppetlabs.com package repository. To enable the repository, run the following command on the CentOS box:-
   
   adding the repo  Expand source

2. Install Puppet on the Puppet Master Server

   Run the following command on the CentOS box
   
   puppetmaster install  Expand source
   This will install a test quality puppet server. Do not start the puppet server yet.

3. Install Puppet on Agent Nodes 

   a) Download the windows agent package from here:- http://downloads.puppetlabs.com/windows
   b) Run the following command in powershell to install puppet:-
   
   
   Puppet Agent Install - Windows  Expand source
   
   c) Once the installer finishes, the puppet client will be installed, running, and at least partially configured. The puppet node should now make a cert request to the puppet CA server.

4. Sign the Certificate Request - On the puppet CA master server

   a) Now that the cert request is made by the agent node, it needs to be signed by the CA master server, so that a certificate is created for the agent and the puppet master and agent can communicate.
   b) Run the following commands on the server to view the list of cert requests and then sign the cert request made by the specific agent node.
   
   Sign the Cert Request  Expand source

Installing Puppet: Post-Install Tasks 

Configure a Puppet Master Server 

a) Get the Master’s Names and Certificates Set Up 

1. When you create the puppet master’s certificate, you must include every DNS name at which agent nodes might try to contact the master.
2. In the [main] section of the master’s puppet.conf file, set the dns_alt_names setting to a comma-separated list of each hostname the master should be allowed to use. The puppet.conf file that I configured looks as follows:-

3. As this is a CA master, run the following command:-
    This will create the CA certificate and the puppet master certificate, with the appropriate DNS names included. Once it says Notice: Starting Puppet master version <VERSION>, type ctrl-C to kill the     process.

b) Put Your Puppet Modules and Manifests in Place 

1. The following 2 Modules were created - common AND regional
    1a. The 'common' module contains the following:-

  1b. The 'regional' module includes the following. Note that this module is to be applied to puppet nodes which are meant to be 'TUC Regional Layer Servers' only:-

c) Main Manifest File

 This is the file that is present under /etc/puppet/manifests/

d) Configure a Production-Ready Web Server 

Puppet includes a basic puppet master web server, but you cannot use it for real-life loads. You must configure a production quality web server before you start managing your nodes with Puppet. Any Rack-based application server stack will work with a puppet master, I have use Passenger combined with Apache.
Make sure puppet master has been run at least once, so that all required SSL certificates are in place.

Install Apache 2 

Install Rack/Passenger 

Configure Apache 

Install the puppet master Rack application, by creating a directory for it and copying the config.ru file from the Puppet source.

Create and Enable the Puppet Master Vhost 

Create a VHost .conf file. Call it puppetmaster.conf. Copy this file to /etc/httpd/conf.d/

Start or Restart the Apache service 

And Bingo! Your Puppet setup is complete. If all is well, the automation should work and all the steps mentioned above should be automatically carried out on the client nodes.