Fixing puppet "Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled" error

While debugging and setting up Puppet I am still running the agent and master from CLI in --no-daemonize mode. I kept getting an error on my agent - ""Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled".

The fix was quite simple and a little embarrassing. Firstly I forgot to run my puppet master with root privileges which meant that it was unable to write incoming certificate requests to disk. That's the embarrassing part and after I looked at my shell prompt and noticed this issue fixing it was quite simple.

Firstly I got the puppet ssl path by running the command puppet agent --configprint ssldir

Then I removed that directory so that my agent no longer had any certificates or requests.

On my master side I cleaned the old certificate by running puppet cert clean --all (this would remove all my agent certificates but for now I have just the one so its quicker than tagging it).

I started my agent up with the command puppet agent --test which regenerated the certificate and sent the request to my puppet master. Because my puppet master was now running with root privileges (*cough*) it was able to write to its ssl directory and store the request.

I could then sign the request on my puppet master by running puppet cert sign --all

When running normally the puppet master will run as the puppet user so I'm not overly worried about running it as root in CLI while I debug it.

Comments

Using Fail2Ban to protect a Varnished site from scrapers

I'm using Varnish to cache a fairly busy property site. Varnish works like a bomb for normal users and has greatly improved our page load speed. For bots that are scraping the site, presumably to add the property listings to their own site, though the cache is next to useless since the bots are sequentially trawling through the whole site. I decided to use fail2ban to block IP's who hit the site too often. The first step in doing so was to enable a disk based access log for Varnish so that fail2ban will have something to work with. This means setting up varnishncsa. Add this to your /etc/rc.local file: varnishncsa -a -w /var/log/varnish/access.log -D -P /var/run/varnishncsa.pid This starts up varnishncsa in daemon mode and appends Varnish access attempts to /var/log/varnish/access.log Now edit or create /etc/logrotate.d/varnish and make an entry to rotate this access log: /var/log/varnish/*log { create 640 http log compress ...

Translating a bit of the idea behind domain driven design into code architecture

I've often participated in arguments discussions about whether thin models or thin controllers should be preferred. The wisdom of a thin controller is that if you need to test your controller in isolation then you need to stub the dependencies of your request and response. It also violates the single responsibility principal because the controller could have multiple reasons to change. Seemingly, the alternative is to settle on having fat models. This results in having domain logic right next to your persistence logic. If you ever want to change your persistence layer you're going to be in for a painful time. That's a bit of a cargo cult argument because honestly who does that, but it's also a violation of the single responsibility principal. One way to decouple your domain logic from both persistence and controller is to use the "repository pattern". Here we encapsulate domain logic into a data service. This layer deals exclusively with imple...

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted. This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel. A thorough comparison of the patterns is available here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework. It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database. Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

Adventures in IT

Search This Blog