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Gotcha with Puppet Windows client

Making a quick note to document the version gotcha encountered while running puppet client on Windows.

I downloaded the latest and greatest available version of the puppet client on a Windows Server 2012 R2 box, but when running the puppet agent for the first time interactively to generate the certificate request to the puppet master server it blew up with below error message.


  1. Quickest way to get the puppet binaries all accessible is "Start Command Prompt with Puppet" shortcut.

  2. Once in the cmd prompt, run puppet_interactive. This will run the puppet agent on demand and when run for the first time issue a certificate request to the puppet master to sign. But this threw up the below error :

    Error: Could not request certificate: Error 400 on SERVER: The environment must be purely alphanumeric, not 'puppet-ca'



Wow! that is really descriptive about what went wrong. I was able to find a useful answer here.

 It appears that, I was running incompatible versions of the puppet master (v3.8.7 ) and client(v4.7.0).


So I went to the puppet website and downloaded the puppet agent for v3.8.7,
removed the incompatible one and installed the v3.8.7. Once it was done, ran the puppet agent again and I could see the certificate request showing up for the node on the puppet master.


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