[Pkg-puppet-devel] Bug#1080489: Reports causing unbounded filesystem usage growth

[Jérôme Charaoui]

Package: puppet-agent
Severity: serious
Version: 8.4.0-1
Control: affects -1 puppetserver

In bug #1078911 [0], a user reported that a cron job responbile for 
cleaning up old reports previously shipped in puppet-master was no 
longer shipped in puppetserver. The consequence was an accumulation of 
files under /var/lib/cache/reports until the filesystem filled up and 
the system broke.

Further research has shown that the issue doesn't only affect 
environments where Puppet agents are attached to a Puppet Server, but 
also the "puppet apply" command which generates and stores reports 
locally upon every invocation, with no automatic cleanup out of the box.

An upload of the puppetserver package adding a cleanup cron job led to a 
discussion thread [1] on the puppet-team mailing list. While the 
participants were unable to agree on the default retention this cron job 
should follow, there was agreement that ultimately, storing reports on 
the filesystem was a bad default and should simply be disabled in new 
installations.

To do so requires a change in the libraries shipped by the puppet-agent 
package, where defaults used by both agent and server are defined.

After consultation with the larger Puppet community on IRC, a pull 
request appeared to also disable reports by default in upstream Puppet 
[2]. Comments from a Puppet developper suggests this change will only be 
shipped in a future Puppet 9 release, however.

[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1078911
[1] 
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-puppet-devel/2024-August/013829.html
[2] https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet/pull/9461