Puppet agent can't find server

Question

I'm new to puppet, but picking it up quickly. Today, I'm running into an issue when trying to run the following:

$ puppet agent --no-daemonize --verbose --onetime  **err: Could not request certificate: getaddrinfo: Name or service not known Exiting; failed to retrieve certificate and waitforcert is disabled** 

It would appear the agent doesn't know what server to connect to. I could just specify --server on the command line, but that will be of no use to me when this runs as a daemon in production, so instead, I specify the server name in /etc/puppet/puppet.conf like so:

[main]     server = puppet.<my domain> 

I do have a DNS entry for puppet.<my domain> and if I dig puppet.<my domain>, I see that the name resolves correctly.

All puppet documentation I have read states that the agent tries to connect to a puppet master at puppet by default and your options are host file trickery or do the right thing, create a CNAME in DNS, and edit the puppet.conf accordingly, which I have done.

So what am I missing? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

D'oh! Need to sudo to do this! Then everything works.

Answer 2

I had to use the --server flag:

sudo puppet agent --server=puppet.example.org