Swift puppet module creates (unused) /home/swift

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman]

The Swift Puppet module attempts to create /home/swift in https://github.com/stackforge/puppet-swift/blob/master/manifests/init.pp:

  file { '/home/swift':
    ensure => directory,
    mode => '0700',
  }

Nothing else appears to use this directory, and in environments where /home is mounted from a remote system or is maintained by automount it may not be root writeable, which causes the module to throw an error. It is also possible that home directories aren't actually located in /home.

Since nothing appears to use this directory, removing this stanza from the manifest seems like an easy solution.

[Lars Kellogg-Stedman (larsks)]

Someone has actually run into this problem:

https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/27047/packstack-install-fails-with-non-standard-home-path/

[Kent Holloway (drizit)]

We automount all /homes from a NFS location and local nodes don't have permissions to create or modify directories or directory permissions on the NFS mount so Packstack fails to install until you create /home/swift and set it's permissions to 0700 (even if you don't use this directory it has to exist!).

It would be much better if it used the directory defined in /etc/passwd for the user OR tested for usability of the /homes dir before failing hard.

Thanks.

[Alex Tomic (atomic777)]

I ran into the same problem in our environment where we have an NFS mounted /home.

An ugly but effective workaround was to change /home/swift to another directory outside of home directly in the installed puppet module. I re-ran packstack and I seem to have a working swift installation now.

[Ali (ali-0)]

I ran into same problem. Just changed /home/swift to point to another directory (with chmod 0700) outside of home and re ran the packstack.

For those who do not know whic file to edit:
/usr/share/openstack-puppet/modules/swift/manifests/init.pp

Please fix this issue. Thanks.