The fileserver in Puppet is useful for quickly centralizing configuration files for multiple servers. It works well for serving small text configuration files to clients, but not recommended for large files since it places them into memory before sending them out. For larger files, I recommend using git or rsync instead since it doesn’t affect the performance of the puppetmaster server.

After installing it on Scientific Linux 6.1, I had to go through some extra steps because of the SELINUX restrictions. Here’s the steps I went through to get the Puppet fileserver working.

By default, SELinux will block the ability for Apache/webapps to write to files in Fedora. This is a security feature to limit what folders Apache can write to. You can notice this issue if you get errors in your Apache logs such as:

PHP Warning:  move_uploaded_file(): Unable to move ‘/tmp/…’ to ‘…….’

Command to set permissions:

chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t [Name of Folder]

You can check the SELinux permissions via the following command:
ls -halZ