How to add a puppet client to puppet master.

Before a new puppet client be allowed to fetch manifest from puppet server, the client will have to be signed and below command would do the job

[root@puppetclient ~]# puppet agent --server puppetmaster --test --waitforcert 30



The above command will execute puppet as agent mode and connect to server puppetmaster (** remote server name in here have to match the remote server hostname or otherwise client agent will come up with error "err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: hostname was not match with the server certificate"). Option "--test" means the agent will be executed in test mode and then --waitforcert 30 means the puppet client will wait for 30 seconds for server to sign up the certificate. If 30 seconds passed and the client certificate is still not signed, the client agent will stop and exit.

So on server, below command would list out the certs pending for approval

root@puppetmaster:~# puppetca --list
  puppetclient
(CC:2B:2B:9D:4A:EF:3F:15:EF:60:C7:73:C9:18:FF:D1)


root@puppetmaster:~# puppetca --sign puppetclient
notice: Signed certificate request for puppetclient
notice: Removing file Puppet::SSL::CertificateRequest puppetclient at '/var/lib/puppet/ssl/ca/requests/puppetclient'