I've broken my puppet, clients are failing reporting " Could not run Puppet configuration client: Invalid parameter stage"

Question

I'm getting this error on all my clients, debian and CentOS, where the line number depends on which case is selected for the OS;

err: Could not run Puppet configuration client: Invalid parameter stage at /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes.pp:32

The server is CentOS 5.4 with packages from the epel-puppet repos;

# rpm -qa | grep puppet
puppet-dashboard-1.0.3-3
puppet-2.6.1-0.3.rc3.el5
puppet-server-2.6.1-0.3.rc3.el5

The clients are;

# rpm -qa | grep puppet
puppet-0.25.5-1.el5

and my code to bootstrap the puppet install in nodes.pp looks like this;

node default {
        include puppet
        if versioncmp($puppetversion, '2.6.0') < 0 {
                        case $operatingsystem {
                                CentOS: {
                                notice('In the centos cases')
                                        file { "/etc/puppet/puppet.conf":
                                                owner => root,
                                                group => root,
                                                mode => 644,
                                                source => "puppet:///bpcommon/basenode/etc/puppet/puppet-
centos.conf",
**line 32                               }
                                }
                                debian: {
                                        file { "/etc/puppet/puppet.conf":
                                                owner => root,
                                                group => root,
                                                mode => 644,
                                                source => "puppet:///bpcommon/basenode/etc/puppet/
puppet.deb.conf",
                                        }
                                }
                        }
        }

}

any suggestions what the error is about, I am guessing that the server is providing a stage parameter which the client is rejecting. but I was under the impression the server should work with older clients..

This was working well with back-version puppet clients on debian puppet clinet version 0.24.5-3

now everything has stopped working 0.24 and 0.25 clients.

I presume it is an incompatibility problem between the 2.6.0 stage functionality and backversion, but I seem to have done something to trigger it.

Answer 1

This is actually a bug, and there is a patch available in a testing branch; http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/4693