Recovery from site.pp misconfig for control node

[Paul Michali]

In setting up site.pp, the node name for the control node was changed everywhere (e.g. control-101), except for $controller_hostname, which had the default value of control-server. After running "puppet apply" and "clean_node.sh control-101", the site.pp file was corrected so that $controller_hostname matched the other occurrences of the host name.

Running "cobbler system list" showed the correct node name (control-101), and "clean_node.sh control-101" proceeded to build the node. However, the node was created with the name control-server and since there is no site.pp node definition for that node, it uses a default node type and doesn't set up the node as a control node.

Attempted to resolve by "cobbler system remove --name=control-101", "puppet cert clean control-server", dropping and recreating the puppet database in MySQL, and re-running "puppet apply" and "clean_node.sh control-101", but the same result occurred.

Found that issue was caused by /etc/hosts containing an entry for control-server with the same IP, and positioned before the entry for control-101. Apparently this file is being used to obtain the node name, instead of using what is in site.pp.

Although a misconfiguration, this was both difficult to recover from and not obvious as to why the control-server was still being used, even when all traces of it were removed from the scripts, databases, etc.