Using Puppet for Auditing

Question

I have a puppet infrastructure setup in my organisation such that i need to utilize it for auditing all the agent servers to check the packages that are installed and patch if needed, I have no clue as to how do i begin with this. Please help

Answer 1

For auditing, there is a native Puppet metaparameter of audit:

file { '/etc/hosts':
  audit => [ owner, group, mode ],
}

Puppet will then generate auditing log messages, which are available in your standard Puppet reports:

audit change: previously recorded value owner root has been changed to owner james

One approach that you can use Puppet patch-management for is:

• Manage your own mirrors of external package repositories with Puppet

• Control when you update those mirrors when a patch comes out Have

• Puppet update packages on a rough schedule with an Exec resource, cron-job etc.