Managing Infrastructure with Puppet

MCollective Commands

With both the servers and a client configured, we’re ready to start issuing MCollective commands. Let’s start off with the mc-find-hosts command. When run without any argument, mc-find-hosts will list all of the MCollective servers that are currently active and listening:

:> mc-find-hosts
A.example.com
B.example.com
C.example.com
D.example.com

We can also get some information about our individual MCollective nodes. mc-inventory will tell us what agents are available on a node, what Puppet classes that node is a member of, and assuming the Facter module is installed, a list out all of the available Facter facts about the node:

:> mc-inventory A.example.com

Inventory for A.example.com:

Server Statistics:
    Version: 1.0.1
    Start Time: Fri May 06 11:10:34 -0700 2011
    Config File: /etc/mcollective/server.cfg
    Process ID: 22338
    Total Messages: 143365
    Messages Passed Filters: 75428
    Messages Filtered: 67937
    Replies Sent: 75427
    Total Processor Time: 162.09 seconds
    System Time: 73.08 secondsAgents:
    discovery       filemgr        package 
    iptables        nrpe           rpcutil  
    process         puppetd        
    service

Configuration Management Classes:
    ntp             php                apache2
    mysql-5            varnish

Facts:
    architecture => x86_64
    domain => example.com
    facterversion => 1.5.7
    fqdn => A.example.com 
    hostname => A
    id => root
    is_virtual => true
    kernel => Linux
    kernelmajversion => 2.6
    kernelversion => 2.6.35

This is already a useful tool for diagnostics and inventory on all of your Puppet-managed servers, but MCollective also lets us execute agents on ...