As of today we're using Exported Resources to let our Munin and Bacula servers know about their clients.

It's really easy to set up. Enable stored configuration on the puppetmaster, create a resource the client exports and a place to collect them in the server config.

Looks like this for the client node config:

  @@file { "/var/local/puppet/munin-nodes/$fqdn":
     content => "[$fqdn]\n other munin stuff here", 
     tag => "munin",
  }

And for the server node:

  File <<| tag == 'munin' |>>

So, what does this do, really?

• when puppet runs on the client node:
• encounter the @@file resource
• save the encounter as well as the parameters to the storedconfigs db on the puppetmaster (in our case PostgreSQL of course).
• that's it for the client node
  
• when puppet runs on the server node:
• encounter the File <<||>> directive
• query all the stored @@file encounters from the storedconfigs db
• only those matching the specified tag will be used
• realize all the matching files onto the server node
• => lots of files in /var/local/puppet/munin-node/

Easy, huh.

Note though, that the client node does not send a fully realized template back to puppetmaster, but will send the encounter of the @@file resource and the available $variables etc.
Also note that updates to the @@file resource will only become visible on the server node, after both the client node and the server node had a puppet run. (The exporting client node run must come before the server node run.)

Setup notes for puppetmaster on Debian etch:

• You probably already run puppet and puppetmaster from backports.debian.org.
• That version requires the rails package from testing. It's not in bpo, so either fetch it from testing and directly install it or rebuild it yourself on etch (needs 2 or 3 other packages as well, _if_ you rebuild it). Rebuilding was painless though.

One more thing: if you want to manage the munin server, you'll have to use something like concatenated_file [from git.black.co.at] to generate munin.conf (as munin can't include a directory into it's configuration).