[Pkg-puppet-devel] Puppet 4 (stretch) Master with 3 (jessie) agents?

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Hi Wilmer,

On 00:47 Wed 06 Sep     , Wilmer van der Gaast wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I *hope* this is a reasonable place to ask this question:
> 
> While upgrading my (tiny) fleet, bit by bit, I had some issues getting
> that combination going. But I read the following bit in NEWS.Debian:
> 
> """
>   The Ruby Puppet master as shipped in Debian can currently handle
> Puppet 3.x clients only when run under a rack-enabled web server. If you
> are using the standalone (WEBrick) puppet master from the puppetmaster
> package and want to support Puppet 3.x clients, please switch to using
> puppet-master-passenger instead.
> 
>   As always, you should upgrade the Puppet master first, and the clients
> afterwards. Puppet 4.x clients will not work against a Puppet 3.x master.
> 
>  -- Apollon Oikonomopoulos <apoikos at debian.org>  Wed, 11 Jan 2017
> 18:19:34 +0200
> """
> 
> Timestamp looked recent, but ... this info contradicts what I see
> elsewhere (where Puppetserver, not in Debian from what I can tell, is
> the only thing backward compatible), and indeed now that I've finally
> migrated my master to use passenger, I'm still getting the same issues
> on v3 agents.
> 
> Is this as expected and should the NEWS be removed? And what's the
> most-used solution, installing puppet from jessie-backports on old
> machines for now?

The NEWS entry *should* be correct. In fact I'm currently running a 
production setup with Puppet 3 agents talking to a Puppet 4 master and I 
know others are doing the same. Could you please give a bit more 
information regarding your configuration and the problems you are 
facing?

Note that Puppet 3 agent support is a Debian-specific patch. Upstream 
Puppet 4 supports Puppet 3 agents only via Puppet Server indeed.

> 
> (Given what I've read about parser/facts incompatibility, I suppose
> that's not a terrible idea anyway...)

Again, Puppet 3 agents should run fine with a Debian Puppet 4 master. Of 
course you need to fix all compatibility issues in your manifests, but 
the catalog format (which is what the agent sees) has not changed at 
all.

Regards,
Apollon