Need apt-pinning to ensure Cisco OS packages get installed

[Mark T. Voelker]

We've been running into some issues of late in which if a Cisco package repo is unreachable for some reason (usually a proxy problem), the Ubuntu packages for OpenStack components get installed rather than the Cisco ones. To prevent that, Daneyon has suggested that we add apt-pinning to our Puppetry, ala:

apt::pin {'cisco': priority => '990', originator => 'LP-PPA-cisco-openstack-mirror_folsom',}

[Mark T. Voelker (mvoelker)]

I think a more correct incantation is probably something like:

    apt::pin { "cisco":
        priority => '990',
        #release => 'folsom',
        originator => 'Cisco'
    }

Which results in:

root:/etc/puppet/manifests# cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/cisco.pref
# cisco
Package: *
Pin: release o=Cisco
Pin-Priority: 990
root:/etc/puppet/manifests#

Note that "originator" and "release" are essentially mutually exclusive (it's an if/elseif loop in the Puppet apt module, and "release" is higher up). The name supplied to the "originator" argument is supposed to match the "Origin:" line in the repository in question's Release file (e.g. ftp://ftpeng.cisco.com/openstack/cisco/dists/folsom/Release), hence "Cisco".

I ran an "apt-get update;apt-cache showpkg python-nova" by way of testing this, and verified that it did indeed prefer the Cisco version of the package rather than the Ubuntu.

[Mark T. Voelker (mvoelker)]

Pull request here:
https://github.com/CiscoSystems/folsom-manifests/pull/40