Setting up the Puppet agent

As was explained earlier, the master mainly serves instructions to agents in the form of catalogs that are compiled from the manifest. You have also prepared a node block for your first agent in the master manifest.

Installing the agent software is easy; you did this at the start of Chapter 1, Writing Your First Manifests. The plain Puppet package that allows you to apply a local manifest contains all the required parts in order to operate a proper agent.

If you are using Puppet Labs packages, use the instructions from earlier in this chapter. On agent machines, you need not install the puppetserver package. Just get puppet-agent instead.

After a successful package installation, one needs to specify where puppet agent can find the puppet server:

root@puppetmaster # puppet config set –-section agent server pup-petmaster.example.net

Afterwards, the following invocation is sufficient for an initial test:

root@agent# puppet agent --test
Info: Creating a new SSL key for...