Puppet installed -- let's do something!

Having got a critical mass (but not all) of my servers running puppet and talking to the puppetmaster, I was ready to start actually doing something with puppet.  So, the first thing I wanted to do, was update the motd on the servers.  I appreciate a standard look and feel when logging into a server and being provided with some useful info about the host I'm on.  Moreover, I wanted to communicate to system users that

I found this: https://github.com/aussielunix/puppet-motd, which uses a puppet template to collect a number of facts along with a really big ASCII banner, that I quite like.
                              _   

 _ __  _   _ _ __  _ __   ___| |_ 
| '_ \| | | | '_ \| '_ \ / _ \ __|
| |_) | |_| | |_) | |_) |  __/ |_ 
| .__/ \__,_| .__/| .__/ \___|\__|
|_|         |_|   |_|             
                                            _   _ 
 _ __ ___   __ _ _ __   __ _  __ _  ___  __| | | |
| '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ / _` |/ _` |/ _ \/ _` | | |
| | | | | | (_| | | | | (_| | (_| |  __/ (_| | |_|
|_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_|\__,_|\__, |\___|\__,_| (_)
                             |___/                


Any files that have a 'Puppet' header need to be changed in puppet. 

Interesting tidbit
In my motd.erb template, I included:

Uptime:    <%= uptime %>

What happens with this, is that the "uptime" fact (and the other facts included in the template) gets evaluated on the client on every puppet run and a flat file without the puppet mock-up is laid down on the file system.  This file gets compared and reevaluated on every run.  Here's the point: every day the uptime changes and a new file is laid down in /etc/motd and the old file is backed up.  This is clearly pretty inefficient, and needs to be replaced with a function that will process/update the uptime on login, and not on every puppet run.

Resources
https://github.com/aussielunix/puppet-motd
My init.pp and motd.erb are in the comments I just discovered that I can't format in comments, so adding the file specs after the jump...



motd.erb


Welcome!  
Host: <%= hostname %> (<%= ipaddress %>)
OS: <%= operatingsystem %>, <%= operatingsystemrelease %>, <%= architecture %>, <%= kernelrelease %>
<% if has_variable?("processor0") then -%>
Processor: <%= processorcount %>x <%= processor0 %>
<% end -%>
Hardware:  <%= productname %>, <%= virtual %>, RAM: <%= memorysize %>
Uptime:    <%= uptime %>
                              _   
 _ __  _   _ _ __  _ __   ___| |_ 
| '_ \| | | | '_ \| '_ \ / _ \ __|
| |_) | |_| | |_) | |_) |  __/ |_ 
| .__/ \__,_| .__/| .__/ \___|\__|
|_|         |_|   |_|             
                                            _   _ 
 _ __ ___   __ _ _ __   __ _  __ _  ___  __| | | |
| '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ / _` |/ _` |/ _ \/ _` | | |
| | | | | | (_| | | | | (_| | (_| |  __/ (_| | |_|
|_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_|\__,_|\__, |\___|\__,_| (_)
                             |___/                


Any files that have a 'Puppet' header need to be changed in puppet. 


init.pp


class motd {
 file {'/etc/motd':
      ensure  => present,
      mode    => 444,
      content => template("motd.erb"), 
     }
}