Installing MCollective on Clear Linux Latest

MCollective is a tool used for orchestrating actions across multiple servers. It is developed by Puppet and is used to manage your infrastructure. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MCollective on Clear Linux latest distribution.

Prerequisites

Before starting with the installation process, you should ensure that:

  1. You have a Clear Linux latest distribution running.
  2. You have a sudo user account.

Step 1: Update the system

To avoid any conflict or issues during the installation process, update your system to the latest version using the following command:

$ sudo swupd update

Step 2: Install Ruby

MCollective relies on Ruby, so you need to have Ruby installed on your system. Clear Linux provides a bundle-ruby package, which you can install using the following command:

$ sudo swupd bundle-add ruby-basic

Step 3: Install MCollective

Now that you have Ruby installed on your system, you can install MCollective using the following command:

$ sudo swupd bundle-add mcollective

Step 4: Configure MCollective

Once you have installed MCollective, you need to configure it to work correctly. By default, the configuration file is located in the /etc/mcollective directory.

Add User

First, we need to create a user for MCollective. We will create a user called 'mcollective'.

$ sudo useradd -m mcollective

Configure authorization

To enable authorization, create the following file with your favorite editor:

$ sudo vi /etc/mcollective/server.cfg

Add the following parameters to the file:

plugin.authorizer = psk
securityprovider.psk = s3cr3tp4ssw0rd

This will enable 'psk' as the authorization plugin and set the pre-shared key to 's3cr3tp4ssw0rd'.

Configure security

To enable security, create the following file with your favorite editor:

$ sudo vi /etc/mcollective/server.cfg

Add the following parameters to the file:

plugin.security = psk
securityprovider.psk = s3cr3tp4ssw0rd

This will enable 'psk' as the security plugin and set the pre-shared key to 's3cr3tp4ssw0rd'.

Configure connection

To configure the connection, create the following file with your favorite editor:

$ sudo vi /etc/mcollective/client.cfg

Add the following parameters to the file:

plugin.ssl_ca_file = /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
plugin.ssl_client_cert = /etc/pki/tls/certs/client.pem
plugin.ssl_client_key = /etc/pki/tls/private/client.key

Step 5: Start MCollective

To start MCollective, execute the following command:

sudo systemctl start mcollective

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install MCollective on Clear Linux latest distribution. You also learned how to configure it to work correctly. With MCollective, you can now orchestrate actions across multiple servers using a single interface.