Override or disable built-in facts in Puppet Enterprise 2015.3 and later

When Facter's built-in facts cause issues with third-party software or Puppet Enterprise, you might want to override or disable them.

For example:

• The ec2 structured fact might cause repeated connections to Openstack metadata nodes.

• When a fact is very large it might cause performance issues in Puppet Enterprise such as slow Puppet runs.

• Solaris systems automount each user's home directory causing the mountpoints fact, which stores all filesystems mounted on each system, to become very large.

Version and installation information

PE version:
2015.3 to 2019.1: Monolithic
2019.2 and later: All supported architectures

Solution

In PE 2016.4.5 and later, block the generation of ec2_metadata, ec2_userdata, mountpoints, filesystems, or partitions facts using the blocklist setting in facter.conf. This solution prevents all facts within the listed groups from being resolved when Facter runs.

If you can’t use that solution, complete the following steps to create a module that overrides the fact. This example uses the mountpoints fact in a version of PE earlier than 2016.4.5. The new module uses a custom fact to replace the facts value with an empty string. You can override a different fact by replacing mountpoints in steps 3 and 7 with a different fact.

1. Create a module: puppet module generate --skip-interview user-factoverride

2. Create a directory for your fact in the module: mkdir -p factoverride/lib/facter

3. Create a custom fact in the file factoverride/lib/facter/mountpoints_override.rb with the following contents:

     Facter.add(:mountpoints) do
       has_weight 100
     end

4. If you use Code Manager: Deploy the module using Code Manager.

   If you do not use Code Manager: Deploy the module to the module directory for the desired environment.

5. Log into the the primary server (called the master in older versions of PE) as root.

6. Copy the new fact to the cache directory with pluginsync by running puppet agent -t. Your output should be similar to the following:

   Info: Using configured environment 'production' Info: Retrieving pluginfacts Info: Retrieving plugin Notice: /File[/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/cache/lib/facter/mountpoints_override.rb]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}7392c29fb7fe442b55196fc7aa8a92fb' Info: Loading facts Info: Caching catalog for puppetserver.domain.com Info: Applying configuration version '1c4bf0f741772f86cc7d91479a85b9d6b78f455d'

7. Verify that the override was successful by checking that mountpoints does not return any output. As root on the primary server run facter -p mountpoints.