“Much better signal to noise experience than Twitter IMHO.” this often depends on the amount of people active (and followed) though. When it is smaller, often is better

Day 3 is there. https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/3 My solution added to the thread on the community repo: https://github.com/puppetlabs/community/discussions/28#discussioncomment-4298989 Today I had problems with understanding more some functions (the difficulty is in the details) and sometimes is not that easy to avoid reassigning variables, with that it would be much more simple (but less fun). Sharing solutions could help showing some less obvious functionality of puppet code. For example today I learned that string are iterable (I realized later that indeed they are indexed) and thus a whole lot could be done, but this info is not explicit in the documentation (at least I didn’t see it). @smortex I saw that you already solved things early, I hope you can add your solutions to the github thread (even a link is enough)!

Day 3 is there. https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/3 My solution added to the thread on the community repo: https://github.com/puppetlabs/community/discussions/28#discussioncomment-4298989 Today I had problems with understanding more some functions (the difficulty is in the details) and sometimes is not that easy to avoid reassigning variables, with that it would be much more simple (but less fun). Sharing solutions could help showing some less obvious functionality of puppet code. For example today I learned that string are iterable (I realized later that indeed they are indexed) and thus a whole lot could be done, but this info is not explicit in the documentation (at least I didn’t see it). @smortex I saw that you already solved things early, I hope you can add your solutions to the github thread (even a link is enough)!

This message was deleted.

This message was deleted.

This is what you’re looking for I guess: https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/7/lang_write_functions_in_puppet.html

And yes, $sum+=$value doesn’t work in Puppet.. I’d try with reduce() instead

This message was deleted.

This message was deleted.

What is the proper way to ensure idempotency for a file resource that should not be created if an un-managed file exists on the node?

With

replace => false

https://puppet.com/docs/puppet/7/types/file.html#file-attribute-replace

But, note that this is just for the content of the file:

Note that this only affects content; Puppet will still manage ownership and permissions.

I want to manage a seed file's contents for a service's first run (yeah, this is orchestration, not CM) but I don't want to manage the resulting file when the service starts with the seed file (that will later be deleted by the service). To make this work the way I hope, I should manage the service-created file with

replace => false

setting only

ensure => present

as well?

Will the service delete the seed file after it's used, or leave in in place but modified?

Delete it.

If the former, then Puppet will keep re-creating the file on each run after the service deletes the seed file.

If the former, then Puppet will keep re-creating the file on each run after the service deletes the seed file.

Hence my question 😄 It should only exist unless a file created by the service exists.

I could probably get away with managing the service-created file so long as I only tweak one line but it'd require a restart of the service ... not ideal but not a deal breaker.

What resources are we talking about here exactly? 1. The seed file:

File[/etc/seed.txt]

2. A service:

Service[foo]

3. Another file created by the service when it runs for the first time? And should the service always read the seed (1) and create the other file (3) when it starts? Or does that only happen as needed (i.e. when (3) doesn't exist)?

What resources are we talking about here exactly? 1. The seed file:

File[/etc/seed.txt]

2. A service:

Service[foo]

3. Another file created by the service when it runs for the first time? And should the service always read the seed (1) and create the other file (3) when it starts? Or does that only happen as needed (i.e. when (3) doesn't exist)?

Yes. Full disclosure, the service is Splunk (you can always presume that's what I'm playing with). When installed, one way to create the admin password is with a seed file ($SPLUNK_HOME/etc/system/local/user-seed.conf) that is read and deleted when Splunk is started. Splunk will then write the user name and hashed password to its etc/passwd file.

Once Splunk is running I can have it hash any string as a password and replace it in the passwd file but it won't (I don't think ... I may have to test this) read the new password hash until restarted.

Does its etc/passwd contain more than just that admin user's info?

It can, yes.

Got it. That complicates things for Puppet. And I presume it's not ideal to have the seed file laying around or existing when Splunk is running normally?

Correct. I can encrypt the password in an eyaml file but it'd be sitting around in plain text on the node.

This may be a good excuse for me to bump this over to a Bolt plan 🤔

sounds very much like a plan/task would suit your requirements.

So, to make this idempotent in Puppet (assuming you choose to do this with Puppet at all), you'd need some way to tell Puppet that the admin hash exists in Splunk's etc/passwd. The standard way to do that is a custom fact. Which you would write to check for the existence of a certain line or pattern in that file and return a boolean

true

or

false.

You could then wrap the seed file's

file

resource in an

unless $facts['splunk_admin_hash_exists'] {

conditional (using whatever fact name you created). But that's pretty fragile.... +1 to Bolt, or some other orchestration tool. Even just a wrapper script that handles it all so the files themselves aren't Puppet-managed would probably be better.