Troubleshooting disaster recovery

Latency over WAN

If the primary server 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.

Replica is connected to a compiler instead of a primary server

The provision command triggers an error if you try to provision a replica node that's connected to a compiler. The error is similar to the following:

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

On the replica you want to provision, edit /etc/puppetlabs/puppet.conf so that the server and server_list settings use a primary server, rather than a compiler.

Both server and server_list are set in the agent configuration file

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

Node groups are empty

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.