Facter Tweaks

New facts testing

While you are writing new facts please refer to ​puppetlabs documentation. In short do something like:

$ mkdir -p ~/lib/ruby/facter ; export RUBYLIB=~/lib/ruby
$ cp /path/to/hardware_platform.rb $RUBYLIB/facter
$ facter hardware_platform
SUNW,Sun-Blade-1500

New facts distributing

To distribute your new facts to puppet clients make a module (preferably the one where you are using this fact, e.g.

$ mkdir -p /etc/puppet/modules/myfirst_module/lib/facter
cp myfirstfact.rb /etc/puppet/modules/myfirst_module/lib/facter

If you are distributing facts this way you can test them on the client by setting FACTERLIB environment variable:

export FACTERLIB=/var/lib/puppet/lib/facter
facter

videocard fact

This ruby snippet adds a videocard fact to facter. You can use this fact to decide if you need to install any proprietary video card drivers. Place in /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/facter/videocard.rb

# Josko Plazonic - lifted from Josko March 14, 2011 by Thomas Uphill
require 'facter'

Facter.add("videocard") do
        confine :kernel => :linux
        ENV["PATH"]="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin"
        setcode do
                controllers = []
                lspciexists = system "/bin/bash -c 'which lspci >&/dev//null'"
                if $?.exitstatus == 0
                        output = %x{lspci}
                        output.each {|s|
                                controllers.push($1) if s =~ /VGA compatible controller: (.*)/
                        }
                end
                controllers
        end
end

After installing you should be able to see the fact like so:

[root@host ~]# facter |grep video
videocard => Intel Corporation 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
[root@host ~]#