Setting up puppet on Debian

jenny — Fri, 16 May 2008 22:54:45 -0600

Debian seems to think the default puppetmaster port is 18140... but all the documentation I found and my puppet client running on Ubuntu says the default port is 8140. Strange.

Opening the configuration file /etc/default/puppetmaster and changing the last line to the right port did the trick.

PORT=8140

I also got the following error when trying to use my newly-signed client certificate:

notice: Got signed certificate

Don't clear out /tmp on boot

jenny — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:04:01 -0600

Yes, /tmp is for temporary files... but cleaning it out on every boot? Whose bright idea was that?

Here's how to fix it. In /etc/default/rcS, locate this line:

TMPTIME=0

This is where the number of days old a file needs to be for it to be deleted on boot is supposed to go. Notice the offending 0. That means delete everything, every time. Change this value to something sensible like 15 or 30.

Other distros use cron to clean out /tmp, and the default for those is 720 hours (30 days).