Not clear where the ipaddress gem should be installed

[robinbowes]

Following on from #128...

I think you need to be clearer about where the ipaddress gem should be installed.

We're using PE 3.8.x with pe-puppetserver on the master, and I fixed the "could not autoload" issue by installing the ipaddress gem into the puppetserver environment, ie:

puppetserver gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc ipaddress

Is it actually required on the client as well? Or only the server?

[rski]

I think only installed it on the clients. It has been a long time since that so I can't really remember, I'll take a look tomorrow. I haven't worked with PE/PS at all so I can't really help with that, sorry.

[robinbowes]

From my testing, it also need to be installed into the puppetserver ruby, as described above.

[rski]

locate ipaddr | grep gem returns something like /usr/local/share/gems/gems/ipaddress-0.8.0 so it does seem to be installed on our master. To be honest, I can't find good documentation on providers depending on gems.
Maybe confining the feature will help and the gem won't be required on the master. It seems this will also make having puppet install the gem with

 package { 'ipaddr':
    ensure => 'installed',
    provider => gem,
  }

possible instead of having to do it some other way before the puppet run.

[jyaworski]

There is a parser function, so it looks like we need to be clear that it's required on both the clients and the servers.

[vholer]

I think the dependency on external library you have to install on all clients is very unfortunate. I had to hack this by adding dirty fake Facter code, which installs the library before serious Puppet functionality is executed:

facter/fix_packages.rb:

if Facter.value(:osfamily ) == 'RedHat' then
  Facter::Core::Execution.exec(<<-EOS)
rpm -q rubygem-ipaddress ||
  yum -y install rubygem-ipaddress
EOS

elsif Facter.value(:osfamily) == 'Debian' then
  Facter::Core::Execution.exec(<<-EOS)
dpkg -l ruby-ipaddress ||
  apt-get install -y ruby-ipaddress
EOS
end

Isn't it possible (and better) to embed the ipaddress into module's lib/ directory? Thanks.

[tuxmea]

We had a similar issue with a type and provider. We decided to confine the provider.
If you really want to hack in the installation in this way I would not go for OS specific installations but use puppet resource package instead.
This will prevent OS specific code.

[vholer]

You are right, on the other hand it takes more time to check and install via puppet resource:

• rpm/yum: check - 0.02s, check&install - 2.2s
• puppet: check - 1.2s, check&install - 3.7s

... and these are best measured time, usually was a more higher.

But that's not important right now. I just wanted to ask if there are any plans to fix this inside the module (either by installing or including the library) or disabling type/provider if required library is not installed. So that the system administrator doesn't have to fix all the machines theirself.

[rski]

@vholer ideally this will be done someday soon and a new version of puppet-network will be released to the forge. Then you'll just have to add include network somewhere in your manifest and things will work.

[vholer]

@rski Thank you.