I'm pretty new to vagrant, would someone who knows more about it (and puppet) be able to explain how vagrant deals with the ssl certs needed when making vagrant testing machines that are processing the same node definition as the real production machines ?

I run puppet in master / client mode, and I wish to spin up a vagrant version of my puppet production nodes, primarily to test new puppet code against.

If my production machine is, say, sql.domain.com I spin up a vagrant machine of, say, sql.vagrant.domain.com. In the vagrant file I then use the puppet_server provisioner, and give a puppet.puppet_node entry of “sql.domain.com” to it gets the same puppet node definition.

On the puppet server I use a regex of something like /*.sql.domain.com/ on that node entry so that both the vagrant machine and the real one get that node entry on the puppet server.

Finally, I enable auto-signing for *.vagrant.domain.com in puppet's autosign.conf, so the vagrant machine gets signed.

So far, so good...

However: If one machine on my network gets rooted, say, unimportant.domain.com, what's to stop the attacker changing the hostname on that machine to sql.vagrant.domain.com, deleting the old puppet ssl cert off of it and then re-run puppet with a given node name of sql.domain.com ? The new ssl cert would be autosigned by puppet, match the node name regex, and then this hacked node would get all the juicy information intended for the sql machine ?!

One solution I can think of is to avoid autosigning, and put the known puppet ssl cert for the real production machine into the vagrant shared directory, and then have a vagrant ssh job move it into place. The downside of this is I end up with all my ssl certs for each production machine sitting in one git repo (my vagrant repo) and thereby on each developer's machine – which may or may not be an issue, but it dosen't sound like the right way of doing this.

tl;dr: How do other people deal with vagrant & puppet ssl certificates for development or testing clones of production machines ?