Description

A collection of Puppet bits and pieces for working with Noah (https://github.com/lusis/noah)

Requirements

• Noah
• puppet

Installation

Install puppet-noah as a module in your Puppet master’s module path. You then need to use pluginsync to sync the functions and fact onto your master.

To use the ENC you can copy the ENC script to somewhere appropriate and enable external node configuration in your Puppet master’s puppet.conf configuration file.

Usage

ENC

The module contains an ENC (External Node Classifier) for Noah in bin/noah_enc. The ENC connecs to a Noah server and returns node classification data. It connects either to a hard-coded Noah URL (defaulting to http://localhost:9292) which you can change in the ENC or override by setting the NOAH_URL environmental variable.

The ENC queries the hosts defined on a Noah server via the Host API and returns a list of classes based on services defined on that host, for example if the host has the services mysql and redis then the ENC will return the classes:

• mysql
• redis

See information on ENC’s here

The noah_get function

The noah_get function returns data from a Noah instance. It can use the Host, Service, Configuration and Application APIs to do this. It requires the rest-client gem to work correctly:

$ gem install rest-client

You can call the function like so by specifying the URL, the type of data, and the name of the data item being returned:

$foo = noah_get("http://localhost:9292", host, bar)

This will return data about the bar host in the form of a hash and assign it to the variable $foo. The function accepts the following data types:

• host
• application
• service
• configuration

You can see the full list of applicable APIs here.

The noah_put function

The noah_put function sends data to a Noah server. It can use the Host, Service, Configuration and Application APIs to do this (although its use of the Service and Configuration API is currently somewhat limited). It requires the rest-client gem to work correctly:

$ gem install rest-client

You can call the function like so by specifying the URL, the type of data, and the data being sent:

noah_put("http://localhost:9292", host, up)

This will create a host named using the value of the fqdn fact with a status of up (valid statuses are up or down).

You can also create a new application:

noah_put("http://localhost:9292", application, foo)

This will create a new application called foo on the Noah server.

You can create a new service:

noah_put("http://localhost:9292", service, mysql)

This will create a new service called mysql with a status of up. As yet you can’t control the service or host status of the service being created.

Or you can create configuration items:

noah_put("http://localhost:9292", configuration, bar)

This creates a configuration item called bar with a format of string and a value of bar. Further work is needed to extend this to support the full set of naming and data types avaialble. Consider this an MVP.

Noah facts

The noah_data fact connects to the Noah server and returns all of the configurations items via the Configuration API as fact values. As Facter currently only supports strings as fact values this means some data isn’t yet in an ideal format.