PE known issues

Puppet Enterprise — 2019.3
This version is out of date. For current versions, see Puppet Enterprise support lifecycle.
This release is no longer generally available due to an issue with upgrade
Sections

These are the known issues in PE 2019.3.

Installation and upgrade known issues

These are the known issues for installation and upgrade in this release.

PuppetDB fails to reinitialize after upgrade

During an upgrade to PE 2019.3.0, the migration of the resource_events table can fail if the server hosting PE PuppetDB is not set to use the UTC time zone. When the migration fails, an error message will be generated that looks similar to ERROR: relation "resource_events_20200131z" does not exist. This message is printed to the console by the puppet-enterprise-installer and also logged to a *.install.log file in the /var/log/puppetlabs/installer/ directory.

To work around this issue, run the database migration in the UTC timezone by executing the following steps as root on nodes hosting PuppetDB.

On Redhat 6:
  1. Run service pe-puppetdb stop
  2. Run /usr/bin/env TZ=utc /opt/puppetlabs/server/bin/puppetdb foreground
  3. Use Ctrl-C to stop PuppetDB after PDBMigrationsPool - Shutdown completed logs.
  4. Run service pe-puppetdb start
On all other master operating systems, use systemctl instead of service:
  1. Run systemctl pe-puppetdb stop
  2. Run /usr/bin/env TZ=utc /opt/puppetlabs/server/bin/puppetdb foreground
  3. Use Ctrl-C to stop PuppetDB after PDBMigrationsPool - Shutdown completed logs.
  4. Run systemctl pe-puppetdb start

Missing package dependencies for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server agent nodes

On agent nodes running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, the libyaml-cpp package and operating system packages prefixed with libboost_ are no longer bundled with Puppet agent, and might not be included in the operating system. See SUSE Linux Enterprise Server dependencies for the full list of required packages. The libyaml-cpp package is in the Desktop Applications SUSE Linux Enterprise Server packaging module, and libboost packages are in the Basesystem module. If you encounter issues when installing Puppet agent on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 nodes, use zypper package-search or the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Customer Center packages list at https://scc.suse.com/packages to locate the packages and instructions on how to install them manually.

Installer can fail due to SSL errors with AmazonAWS

In some cases when attempting to install PE, some master platforms have received SSL errors when attempting to connect to s3.amazonaws.com, and thus have been unable retrieve puppet-agent packages needed for installation. In most cases, you should be able to properly install after updating the CA cert bundle on the master platform. To update the bundle, run the following commands:

rm /etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
yum reinstall ca-certificates

After you update the CA bundle, run the installer again.

Upgrades can fail when using custom database certificate parameters

When upgrading an infrastructure with an unmanaged PostgreSQL database to this version of PE, the upgrade can fail and result in downtime if the databases use custom certificates not issued by the PE certificate authority. This is the case even if you configured the database_properties parameters in pe.conf to set a custom sslrootcert. The upgrader ignores these custom certificate settings.

To manually override the upgrader's certificate settings, run these commands, replacing <NEW CERT> with the name of your custom certificate.
rpm -iUv /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/packages/public/2019.3.0/el-7-x86_64-6.12.0/pe-modules-2019.3.0.2-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
                    
sed -i 's#/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem#/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/<NEW CERT>.pem#'
/opt/puppetlabs/server/data/environments/enterprise/modules/pe_manager/lib/puppet_x/puppetlabs/meep/configure/postgres.rb
                        
./puppet-enterprise-installer - --force
Note: The first step in the code block above includes paths specific to the PE version you're upgrading to. Replace these version information as needed.

Replica upgrade fails when upgrading between recent PE versions

Replica upgrade fails when upgrading between any PE versions from 2019.2 to 2019.5. The failure occurs because the upgrade script checks for PostgreSQL 9.6 packages, and erroneously attempted to migrate to PostgreSQL 11, even though that migration already occurred. As a workaround, before upgrading your replica to one of these affected versions, run puppet infrastructure run remove_old_postgresql_versions on the replica.

High availability known issues

These are the known issues for high availability in this release.

Replica upgrade fails when upgrading between recent PE versions

Replica upgrade fails when upgrading between any PE versions from 2019.2 to 2019.5. The failure occurs because the upgrade script checks for PostgreSQL 9.6 packages, and erroneously attempted to migrate to PostgreSQL 11, even though that migration already occurred. As a workaround, before upgrading your replica to one of these affected versions, run puppet infrastructure run remove_old_postgresql_versions on the replica.

Supported platforms known issues

These are the known issues with supported platforms in this release.

Errors when using puppet code and puppet db commands on FIPS-enabled hardware

When the pe-client-tools packages are run on FIPS-enabled hardware, puppet code and puppet db commands fail with SSL handshake errors. To use puppet db commands on a FIPS-enabled machine, install the puppetdb_cli Ruby gem with the following command: 
/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem install puppetdb_cli --bindir /opt/puppetlabs/bin/
To use puppet code commands on a FIPS-enabled machine, use the Code Manager API. Alternatively, you can use pe-client-tools on a non-FIPS-enabled machine to access a FIPS-enabled master.

FIPS installations do not support Razor

Razor, which is deprecated, doesn't work and isn't supported in FIPS-enabled PE.

Configuration and maintenance known issues

These are the known issues for configuration and maintenance in this release.

puppet infrastructure recover_configuration misreports success if specified environment doesn't exist

If you specify an invalid environment when running puppet infrastructure recover_configuration, the system erroneously reports that the environment's configuration was saved.

Restoring the pe-rbac database fails with the puppet-backup restore command

When restoring the pe-rbac database, the restore process exits with errors about a duplicate operator family, citext_ops.

To work around this issue:
  1. Log into your PostgreSQL instance: 
    sudo su - pe-postgres -s /bin/bash -c "/opt/puppetlabs/server/bin/psql pe-rbac"
  2. Run these commands: 
    ALTER EXTENSION citext ADD operator family citext_ops using btree;
ALTER EXTENSION citext ADD operator family citext_ops using hash;
  3. Exit the PostgreSQL shell and re-run the backup utility.

puppet-backup fails if gems are missing from the master's agent environment

The puppet-backup create command might fail if any gem installed on the Puppet Server isn't present on the agent environment on the master. If the gem is either absent or of a different version on the master's agent environment, you get the error "command puppet infrastructure recover_configuration failed".

To fix this, install missing or incorrectly versioned gems on the master's agent environment. To find which gems are causing the error, check the backup logs for gem incompatibility issues with the error message. PE creates backup logs as a report.txt whenever you run a puppet-backup command.

To see what gems and their versions you have installed on your Puppet Server, run the command puppetserver gem list . To see what gems are installed in the agent environment on your master, run /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem list.

Orchestration services known issues

These are the known issues for the orchestration services in this release.

Orchestrator fails when rerunning tasks on agentless nodes

When you rerun tasks from the Job details page, target nodes that do not have an agent installed are miscategorized as PuppetDB nodes. This causes the orchestrator to fail on those nodes.

Target name localhost unavailable for plans

The special target name localhost is not available in plans for PE because the definition is ambiguous.

Some Bolt stdlib functions fail in PE

The following Bolt stdlib functions return an error if they are run in PE:
  • apply_prep
  • file::read
  • file::write
  • file::readable
  • file::exists
  • set_features
  • add_to_group

For more information, see Plan caveats and limitations.

The function puppet plan show displays invalid plans when Code Manager is disabled

If Code Manager is disabled, the puppet plan show function and the console will still list plans that are contained in a control repo, but those plans cannot be run. Enable Code Manager to run plans.

SSL and certificate known issues

These are the known issues for SSL and certificates in this release.

Regenerating agent certificates fails with autosign enabled

The puppet infrastructure run regenerate_agent_certificate command includes a step for signing the node's certificate. With autosign enabled, an unsigned certificate can't be found, and the command errors out. As a workaround, temporarily disable autosign before running puppet infrastructure run regenerate_agent_certificate.

Code management known issues

These are the known issues for Code Manager, r10k, and file sync in this release.

Default SSH URL with TFS fails with Rugged error

Using the default SSH URL with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) with the rugged provider causes an error of "unable to determine current branches for Git source." This is because the rugged provider expects an @ symbol in the URL format.

To work around this error, replace ssh:// in the default URL with git@

For example, change: 
ssh://tfs.puppet.com:22/tfs/DefaultCollection/Puppet/_git/control-repo
to 
git@tfs.puppet.com:22/tfs/DefaultCollection/Puppet/_git/control-repo

GitHub security updates might cause errors with shellgit

GitHub has disabled TLSv1, TLSv1.1 and some SSH cipher suites, which can cause automation using older crypto libraries to start failing. If you are using Code Manager or r10k with the shellgit provider enabled, you might see negotiation errors on some platforms when fetching modules from the Forge. To resolve these errors, switch your configuration to use the rugged provider, or fix shellgit by updating your OS package.

Timeouts when using --wait with large deployments or geographically dispersed compilers

Because the --wait flag deploys code to all compilers before returning results, some deployments with a large node count or compilers spread across a large geographic area might experience a timeout. Work around this issue by adjusting the timeouts_sync parameter.

r10k with the Rugged provider can develop a bloated cache

If you use the rugged provider for r10k, repository pruning is not supported. As a result, if you use many short-lived branches, over time the local r10k cache can become bloated and take up significant disk space.

If you encounter this issue, run git-gc periodically on any cached repo that is using a large amount of disk space in the cachedir. Alternately, use the shellgit provider, which automatically garbage collects the repos according to the normal Git CLI rules.

Code Manager and r10k do not identify the default branch for module repositories

When you use Code Manager or r10k to deploy modules from a Git source, the default branch of the source repository is always assumed to be master. If the module repository uses a default branch that is not master, an error occurs. To work around this issue, specify the default branch with the ref: key in your Puppetfile.

After an error during the initial run of file sync, Puppet Server won't start

The first time you run Code Manager and file sync on a master, an error can occur that prevents Puppet Server from starting. To work around this issue:

  1. Stop the pe-puppetserver service.
  2. Locate the data-dir variable in /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/conf.d/file-sync.conf.
  3. Remove the directory.
  4. Start the pe-puppetserver service.

Repeat these steps on each master exhibiting the same symptoms, including any compilers.

Puppet Server crashes if file sync can't write to the live code directory

If the live code directory contains content that file sync didn’t expect to find there (for example, someone has made changes directly to the live code directory), Puppet Server crashes.

The following error appears in puppetserver.log: 

2016-05-05 11:57:06,042 ERROR [clojure-agent-send-off-pool-0] [p.e.s.f.file-sync-client-core] Fatal error during file sync, requesting shutdown.
org.eclipse.jgit.api.errors.JGitInternalException: Could not delete file /etc/puppetlabs/code/environments/development
        at org.eclipse.jgit.api.CleanCommand.call(CleanCommand.java:138) ~[puppet-server-release.jar:na]

To recover from this error:

  1. Delete the environments in code dir: find /etc/puppetlabs/code -mindepth 1 -delete
  2. Start the pe-puppetserver service: puppet resource service pe-puppetserver ensure=running
  3. Trigger a Code Manager run by your usual method.

Internationalization known issues

These are the known issues for internationalization and UTF-8 support in this release.

ASCII limitations

Certain elements of Puppet and PE are limited to ASCII characters only, or work best with ASCII characters, including:

  • Names for environments, variables, classes, resource types, modules, parameters, and tags in the Puppet language.

  • File names, which can generate errors when referenced as a source in a file resource or concat fragment.

  • The title and namevar for certain resource types, on certain operating systems. For example, the user and group resources on RHEL and CentOS might contain only ASCII characters in title and namevar.

  • The console password.

Ruby can corrupt the path fact and environment variable on Windows

There is a bug in Ruby that can corrupt the environment variable names and values. This bug causes corruption for only some codepages. This bug might be triggered when environment names or values contain UTF-8 characters that can't be translated to the current codepage.

The same bug can cause the path fact to be cached in a corrupt state.

See an issue? Please file a JIRA ticket in our [DOCUMENTATION] project.
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