Getting Puppet up and Running

First off if after reading all of the articles, documentation, and googling that you can possibly muster in order to solve your problems, go onto IRC at

Freenode.net #puppet

The folks there will be more than happy to help you, LIVE!

Many thanks go out to "ZipKid", "Volcane", and "whack" for helping me out!

Ok, so I had some real trouble even getting Puppet up and running. Again, I'm running CentOS 5.5, and I decided to have puppet run on it's own special VM so that I have some segregation of responsibilities in our infrastructure.

That said, I decided to try and install the latest and greatest version, Puppet; 2.6.3.

In order to accomplish the install using yum, please go to the following VERY helpful site and read the instructions thoroughly before starting on your journey:

http://www.craigdunn.org/2010/08/part-1-installing-puppet-2-6-1-on-centos-with-yumrpm/

Ok, so when you run into certificate errors, you need to keep a couple of things in mind:
1) Run everything with --no-daemonize --debug (puppetmasterd, puppetd)
2) If you get the error, start ALL OVER AGAIN, by going onto the master server and performing the following steps
2 a) puppet cert --list --all
2 b) puppet cert --remove <certmachine.domain.com>
3) deleting EVERYTHING inside /var/lib/puppet/ssl/, and /etc/puppet/ssl/ on ALL machines in question (master and agent(s))

Now re-run the cert request line as shown

puppet agent --no-daemonize --debug --waitforcert 60 --test

You'll see the request come in on the server output. Open another console and run the following on the master:

puppet cert --list

Find the line that shows the FQDN of the agent requesting the certificate and run

puppet cert --sign <machine.domain.com>

That should do it, you can run the following to see if they are talking properly from the agent:

puppet agent --noop --test --server=<servername.domain.com>

You shouldn't see any errors, if you do, go through your .pp files and clean them up as needed.