Puppet Agents

The Puppet Agent (agent) is a daemon that runs on a managed node. To apply the configuration that the agent pulls from the Puppet Server (server), the agent must be able to modify most of the configuration on the system. For this reason, the agent runs as the root user or a user that is assigned the Puppet Management rights profile.

You can configure the time interval at which each agent polls the server. See Configuring the Puppet Server and Agents.

The first time an agent contacts the server, the agent requests an SSL certificate to obtain communication privileges. Subsequently, the agent receives configuration updates from the server only if the certificate is still valid.

To ensure that agents do not receive incorrect configuration information, the agent must authenticate with the server.