I found three different, recently-rebooted hosts today (eeden, radon, es2015) that had no firewall loaded and only a WARNING alert for conntrack/sysctl.
This looks to me like a boot-time race between networking and the ferm init script, as it looks like ferm failed to load due to @resolve failing.
At minimum, we need a CRITICAL Icinga alert that is included in base::firewall and complains very very loudly if there is no firewall set loaded.
As for potential solutions:
- Fixing the race, somehow.
- Deprecating @resolve and falling-back to e.g. subnets/static mappings or Hiera or something.
- Replacing @resolve with a puppet-time resolving of hostnames, via a custom parser function.
I'm setting this to UBN for security reasons until we have the aforementioned Icinga alert. After we have that, we can probably lower this to High.