Intelligent Password Changes with Puppet

I need to change the root password on all my hosts but I have a small problem: some hosts have older md5 hashed passwords and the newer ones use the more secure SHA-512 hash. If I did not care about the different hashes and wanted to have SHA-512 across the board I would do a very simple manifest entry to make this happen: Problem is I want to replace the old md5 hashes with new md5 hashes and the old SHA-512 with new SHA-512; not something that Puppet supports very easily. To do this we are going to build a new module with a Custom Fact written in Ruby. First off I need to explain some things if you are new to Puppet.

• A module is stored under /etc/puppet/modules and is called via an include declaration in the site.pp Master Manifest
• A module has it's own Manifest called init.pp under /etc/puppet/modules/<module_name>/manifests
• Inside the init.pp is a class that MUST be named the same as your folder structure. Example: if the folder at /etc/puppet/modules/<module_name> is named "rootpass" then your class declaration must be "class rootpass {...."
• A module is very powerful and the functionality is written in Ruby

Now that we have those out of the way lets start. If you are doing this your self here is the folder structure to make life easier:

Let's visit each component a piece at a time

1. Custom Fact - sha512rootpass.rb. Puppet if Statements can be a bit tricky (see http://docs.puppetlabs.com/learning/variables.html) so in this case I needed a Custom Fact that checked to see if the root password was a SHA-512 hash which is indicated by it starting with "$6$" (md5 is $1$). If the root password is indeed a SHA-512 hash then the variable sha512rootpass will return with a "true" value. This functionality is delivered by Ruby Facter. For more information take a look at http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/custom_facts.html. My custom fact is silly simple, it just greps the shadow file for "root:$6$*" and if it's there then returns "true" which means that root has a SHA-512 hashed password.

2. New Class - init.pp. The logic for the operation that we actually want to run is located in the init.pp file. Here is where we define our class (reminder, it needs to be the same as you top level folder name). This one basically says "If root is using a SHA-512 password hash (defined by $sha512rootpass = true) replace it with this new one. If not then assume it's md5 and replace it with this new md5 hash.

Now we need to tell Puppet what servers to apply this to and this is done by modifying the site.pp Manifest on the Puppet Master. For now I'm going to apply it to all my nodes and so I just add it to my default. If you wanted you can add a new section that says "node <hostname> {include rootpass}" and it would be applied just to that host.

Now lets test it on an agent box that has an md5 hashed password and a box that has a SHA-512 password. Our older box with md5 is the first up to bat.....

As you can see the password was a md5 ($1$) and was changed appropriately. Next let's look at a box with SHA-512.

As you can see the old password was a SHA-512 hash and has been replaced with the new SHA-512 hash. Success!

Getting Started with Puppet Open Source

I'm starting to work with Puppet and noticed that when I am using the open source version there is not really a good "Getting Started" guide and documentation is rather lacking. Not wanting anyone else to suffer through that here is my attempt at it. Hope it helps others.

Building the Puppet Master

First we are going to check what OS we are running, in my case it's CentOS 6.4 x64 so we're going to grab the repo from yum.puppetlabs.com. After that I look to see what's available and then finally install with a yum install puppet-server.noarch.

 

Once Puppet is installed we need to do some things. First we take a look at the stock puppet.conf file. Now, let's make it useful by adding the server name (remember: this is the Puppet Master so it's $HOSTNAME) and enabling pluginsync.

As you can see the file structure of Puppet is pretty empty with the open source version... Let's add site.pp which is the master Manifest for all your Puppet tasks.

I'm going to add a very simple puppet command that applies to all hosts (nodes) and creates a new user with a SHA-512 password hash. This Manifest file is the source of truth for all your Puppet tasks, more about that later for now remember site.pp is critical.

Lastly before starting the services we need to open 2 ports on the firewall.

Now that the Manifest is complete and we have open ports let's start the Puppet and Puppet Master services.

We did all that work, let's see if Puppet works. (Note, if you get an error here there is a good chance that iptables is blocking your Puppet traffic). To do that we are going to call the Puppet agent and tell it to run, but not apply any changes (-noop). As we can see it detected that our new user account is missing but did not change anything.

That's all great, now let's apply it. There are a couple ways to do this:

1. Wait 30 minutes, the agent will automatically run and apply the change.

2. Run puppet agent --test

As we can see, the change was successfully made on the Puppet Master, now lets go start installing an agent on another host.

Installing Puppet Agents

As you can see we are doing basically the same thing as on the Puppet Master but only installing the Puppet Agent.

After the install completes we need to configure the agent to talk to the Puppet Master. This configuration is done in the same /etc/puppet/puppet.conf as the Puppet Master but we change what we add...

Next you need to start the Puppet Agent Service: puppet resource service puppet ensure=running enable=true

At this point assuming no firewall issues your agent is now talking to the Puppet Master (test using the "puppet agent --test --noop" command we used earlier); however there is still one thing that needs to be done. We need to approve the agent's certificate on the Puppet Master; once that is complete then the agent will start applying changes that are specified in the Puppet Master's site.pp. You do that from the Puppet Master using the puppet cert commands:

Congratulations! You just setup a Puppet Open Source instance and are now well on your way to using Puppet to help you manage your infrastructure.