Puppet and Facter default system facts

Question

I'm still quite new to puppet however I'm writing some deployments with it.

I came a across an issue where I couldn't get symlinks right because for some reason I was getting a mismatch between existing system folders and puppet ${architecture} variable.

I need the following code to work as following:

On Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64 I sould get a link from /usr/lib/libz.so to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so However, I'm getting insted to /usr/lib/amd64-linux-gnu/libz.so which doesn't exist creating than a broken link.

file {"/usr/lib/libz.so":
    ensure => link,
    target => "/usr/lib/${architecture}-linux-gnu/libz.so",
}

Puppet uses Facter to get system facts, and running facter on my command line I get the following:

root@somehost:/root# facter
architecture => amd64
facterversion => 1.6.5
hardwareisa => x86_64
(....)

Running lscpu I get:

root@tsomehost:/root# lscpu 
Architecture:          x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit, 64-bit
(....)

My question is, where does Facter gets its facts from?

Answer 1

The Facter documentation now includes docs about how core facts are resolved.

• architecture uses hardwaremodel, which calls uname -m and then on Debian converts x86_64 to amd64
• hardwareisa calls uname -p

$hardwaremodel might be what you want here, however I think it will return x86_64 if you used a 64-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland, which probably isn't correct for your use-case.

Answer 2

What is your version of Puppet and Facter?

Maybe you have an < 1.6.5 Facter version and thus have this bug: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/11511

Try upgrading if you can.