Puppet Enterprise on SLES

SLES and OpenSuSE are supported operatingsystems by Puppet.
But I always saw trouble when installing either the Puppet Master or the Agent on SLES.

One needs to take care on locales, paranoid umask, required packages.


1. locale

Standard SLES installation will set locale to POSIX.
This will break UTF-8 compatibility with some Puppet Modules.

Instead: set locale to en_US.utf8 in your .bashrc file.

2. paranoid umask

The paranoid umask (0002) will cause severe trouble on SLES.
Please lower the security constrints for umask.

3. required packages

When running SLES 11 one will see an error message regarding a missing package during installation:

nothing provides db43, libgcc

You need to add the SDK channel to get the required package.

What else is missing:

- The Live Management package checkupdates does not know about zypper.
- Modules from other authors might not have proper SLES support.

I will add more articles with more findings.