We have just started using Puppet on our QA environments. All along, I was under the impression that the agents pull the catalog from the master only when puppet is restarted on the agent nodes or only when initiatialized from command line. But yesterday, I was working on a few puppet scripts and was restarting puppet agent every now and then on our test nodes to pull the new catalog, but unfortunately, and unknown to me, the other agents were pulling the test catalogs too (which created a whole lot of undesirable changes on them). No one had restarted puppet on the other nodes. I checked the /var/log/message and realized that it was pulling the catalog from the master node every 30 minutes from day one without the need for a puppet restart. I have the following questions now:
1) When the puppet service is running on puppet agent (ie. daemonized mode), am I right in assuming that it pulls the catalog from the master every 30 minutes and that is the expected behaviour?
2) Where can I control the time interval between each pulls?
3) Is there a way I can stop puppet service on the agents push the catalogs from puppetmaster whenever I wish to?