As part of a larger exercise, I am switching my local VM set from a more-or-less scripted manual configuration towards a fully Puppet-powered one. Of course, it still uses a lot of custom modules and is most likely too ugly to expose to the wider internet, but it does seem to improve my ability to quickly rebuild images if I corrupt them somehow.

One of the tricks I am using is to use a local apply instead of using a Puppet master server - mainly because that master server is again a VM that might need to be build up and consumes some resources that I'd rather have free for other VMs. So what I do now is akin to the following:

~# puppet apply --modulepath /mnt/puppet/modules /mnt/puppet/manifests/site.pp

All I have to do is make sure that the /mnt/puppet location is a shared resource (in my case, an NFSv4 read-only mount) which I can just mount on a fresh image.

Part of this exercise I noticed that Puppet by default uses the regular gentoo provider for the services. I'd like to use the openrc provider instead, as I can easily tweak that one to work with SELinux (I need to prepend run_init to the rc-service calls, otherwise SELinux wants to authenticate the user and Puppet doesn't like that; I have a pam_rootok.so statement in the run_init PAM file to allow unattended calls towards rc-service).

A quick Google revealed that all I had to do was to add a provider => openrc in the service definitions, like so:

service { "net.eth0":
  provider => openrc,
  ensure => running,
}

As mentioned, I still manually patch the openrc provider (located in /usr/lib64/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/puppet/provider/service) so that the run_init command is known as well, and that all invocations of the rc-service is prepended with run_init:

...
  commands :runinit => '/usr/sbin/run_init'
  commands :rcservice => '/sbin/rc-service'
...
 [command(:runinit), command(:rcservice), @resource[:name], :start ]

And the same for the stop and status definitions. I might use Portage' postinst hook to automatically apply the patch so I don't need to do this manually each time.