Puppet

Ben – wrote:

When the puppetmaster is used with nginx, or some other similar server, compression can be easily configured and support should be added to the puppet client to take advantage with used over WAN links.

I have had some experience with Juniper WAN optimizers and the stats for compressing puppet comms are quite good and prompted me to request this feature.

25% compression of the puppet sessions is easily achieved by the Juniper devices.

I wish it would be possible, unfortunately puppetd uses the stdlib Net::Http library (mostly to limit the client dependencies) which under ruby 1.8 is pretty limited. For instance it doesn’t support compression (this is supported in ruby 1.9, though).

Although it might be possible to add support for compression easily with this lib: http://griffin.oobleyboo.com/files/http_encoding_helper/http_encoding_helper.rb

I am aware of the lack of support in ruby 1.8, but the benefits of implementing this for users who utilize puppet in a WAN environment would be huge. I did even looking at wrapping it up with an openvpn compression only tunnel or stunnel with compression enabled but those options are messy.

I would like to see support when running with ruby 1.8 as most of my clients are RHEL5, the http_encoding_helper looks good as it appears to use all standard libraries.

Even enabling support when ruby version is 1.9 or above would be a start.

Can I get a patch for 0.25.5 to enable client compression support?

Unfortunately those patches are built on the development branch and I do not believe it will be possible to back port them to the 0.25.x branch.