High availability known issues

Provisioning a replica node that's connected to a compile master causes a run to fail

If you try to provision a replica node that's connected to a compile master, rather than a primary master, it can cause an error:

Failure during provision command during the puppet agent run on replica 2:
Failed to generate additional resources using 'eval_generate': Error 500 on SERVER: Server Error: Not authorized to call search on /file_metadata/pe_modules with {:rest=>"pe_modules", :links=>"manage", :recurse=>true, :source_permissions=>"ignore", :checksum_type=>"md5"}
Source: /Stage[main]/Puppet_enterprise::Profile::Primary_master_replica/File[/opt/puppetlabs/server/share/installer/modules]File: /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/modules/puppet_enterprise/manifests/profile/primary_master_replica.ppLine: 64

As a workaround, on the replica you want to provision, edit /etc/puppetlabs/puppet.conf so that the server and server_list settings use a primary master, rather than a compile master.

Executing enable command immediately after provisioning can cause error

ERROR [p.p.puppet] Received a PCP error message due to message 7f7ed934-d2ed-4d64-8b5c-e2cb48cb2227 (blocking request for ‘status query’)

To resolve the issue, run puppet agent -t on both the master and replica nodes, then try the enable command again.

Running puppet infrastructure configure fails on a promoted replica

The /etc/puppetlabs/enterprise directory contains configuration files used during installation and upgrade. These files are not automatically copied to a replica; this poses no issue during normal operation, but may cause problems if you need to upgrade on the replica after it is promoted.

To avoid potential issues:

1. Back up the /etc/puppetlabs/enterprise directory of the primary master.
2. When you promote a replica, copy the backup into place.

After HA enablement, both server and server_list are set

When the agent configuration file contains settings for both server and server_list, a warning appears. This warning can occur after enabling a replica in a high availability configuration. You can ignore the warning, or hide it by removing the server setting from the agent configuration, leaving only server_list.

Running enable starts an orchestrator run that fails

When provisioning and enabling a replica, the orchestrator is used to run Puppet on different groups of nodes. If a group of nodes is empty, the tool reports that there's nothing for it to do and the job is marked as failed in the output of puppet job show. This is expected, and doesn't indicate a problem.

RBAC displays permission denied error

On a primary master replica, error messages similar to this may appear in the console services log file:

2016-11-11 17:34:22,824 [pool-4-thread-2] ERROR [p.c.class-updater] Encountered an unexpected exception while trying to synchronize classes from the Puppet Master:
org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: permission denied for relation environment_classes

These errors can be ignored.

Latency over WAN can cause failure

If the master and replica communicate over a slow, high latency, or lossy connection, the provision and enable commands can fail. If this happens, try re-running the command.