Build new puppet-dashboard server

The "Optimize your database once a month" strategy was tried and tested by anteaya and fungi earlier this year: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/23112/ Should follow up to see if we should pursue this again with a freshly configured MySQL database on the new server

At the same time as above, anteaya added the passenger optimizations: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/23127/

Currently have a patch under review for monthly pruning of reports: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/44368/

Taking a look at some options:

1. reinstall what we have re: puppet-dashboard: puppet-dashboard is old and is no longer being supported by PuppetLabs, see this email thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/puppet-users/j44EbTJY7HI/EQSJgh-g1fgJ
The rails version is old and it relys on an older version of ruby, 1.8.7. The most usable version of ruby right now is 1.9.3 and ruby 2 has been released. The current version of rails is rails 3.

2. install a forked/updated version of puppet-dashboard: https://github.com/sodabrew/puppet-dashboard
If you read the bottom post in this email thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/puppet-users/j44EbTJY7HI/EQSJgh-g1fgJ this is the most up-to-date version of puppet-dashboard although it does appear to be a work in progress. It appears to use rails 3 and works with both ruby 1.8.7 or 1.9.3. In my opinion, we should use rvm and install 1.9.3 for using this fork, if that is the selected option.

3. salt has a dashboard, halite, "its first version will be released with 0.17.0. Some old screenshots are here: https://github.com/saltstack/halite and here: https://github.com/saltstack/halite/tree/master/screenshots but there have been quite a few changes since then I think 0.17.0 will be released in the next week or two" UtahDave via irc

4. mgagne pointed out foreman to me: http://theforeman.org/ It is a provisioning tool written in ruby. I had been looking for a dashboard alternative, and foreman does have a dashboard, but it is also its own provisioning tool, so I have no idea how much work would be involved getting a forman dashboard working with puppet. Also ruby.

Based on the options above, I would like to recommend option #2, at least to stand one up and test it to see if we can get it working. I would also like to keep option #3 in the back of our minds, since if we could move to a tool that uses python I think it would be a lot less work to perform maintenance tasks since we would already be familiar with the quirks of certain libraries and mirrors.

We decided to give the sodabrew fork a try. Anita in the process of testing and modifying our puppet module in order to accomplish this.

Working with Hunner of Puppetlabs to investigate usage of puppetboard instead.

Current status: Anita and I got a demo, looks good! As of 11/26/13 meeting Hunner is getting together some apache and other configs to pass along to us.

I've added puppetboard configs to the openstack-infra/config project. We're blocked right now on a vcsrepo problem where the puppetboard module tries to install puppetboard-vcsrepo but openstackci-vcsrepo already exists. We've decided to manage this by installing puppetboard without dependencies.

http://puppetboard.openstack.org/

Puppetboard is live!