Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server

PowerShell for Admins, Tutorials

Quick recap, I’m working through a series of posts about the Desired State Configuration infrastructure that I’m building at Stack Exchange, including some how-to’s.

The High Points

I started with an overview of what and why.  Today, I’m going to start the how.

Building a Pull Server

I’m going to describe how to do this with Server 2012 R2 RTM (NOTE: this is not the General Availability  release, so there may be changes at GA), since that’s the environment I’m working most in.  If there is enough demand, I may follow up with how to do this using the Windows Management Framework on downlevel operating systems after the GA version of WMF 4 is released.
The first step is adding the required roles and features, including the DSC Service.

Add-WindowsFeature Dsc-Service

Fortunately, the Dsc-Service feature has the right dependencies configured so IIS, the correct modules, and the Management OData Extension are all enabled.
Next we need to set up the IIS web site:

  • Create an directory to serve the web application from (I’ll use c:\inetpub\wwwroot\PSDSCPullServer)
  • Copy several files from $pshome/modules/psdesiredstateconfiguration/pullserver (Global.asax, PSDSCPullServer.mof, PSDSCPullServer.svc, PSDSCPullServer.xml) to this directory.
  • Copy PSDSCPullServer.config and rename it to web.config
  • Create a subdirectory named “bin”.
  • Copy one file from $pshome/modules/psdesiredstateconfiguration/pullserver (Microsoft.Powershell.DesiredStateConfiguration.Service.dll) to the “bin” directory.
  • In IIS, create an application pool that runs under the “Local System” account.
  • In, IIS, create a new site (or application in an existing site or just use the existing default site)
  • Point the site or application root to the directory you designated as the root of the site.
  • Unlock the sections of the web config as below
$appcmd = "$env:windir\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe"
& $appCmd unlock config -section:access
& $appCmd unlock config -section:anonymousAuthentication
& $appCmd unlock config -section:basicAuthentication
& $appCmd unlock config -section:windowsAuthentication

 
Now we need to set up the location where the pull server content will be served from.  Installing the DSC Service feature creates a default location ( $env:programfiles\WindowsPowerShell\DscService ).  There’ll you find sub-directories for configuration and modules.  We can use these folders or we can create another location.  I’m going to stick with the defaults for now.  We’ve got a few steps left.
First, we need to copy the Devices.mdb from $pshome/modules/psdesiredstateconfiguration/pullserver to the root of our pull server data location (in this case, $env:programfiles\WindowsPowerShell\DscService )
Update the web.config app settings with the following settings:

<add key="dbprovider" value="System.Data.OleDb" />
<add key="dbconnectionstr" value="Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\DscService\Devices.mdb;" />
<add key="ConfigurationPath" value="C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\DscService\Configuration" />
<add key="ModulePath" value="C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\DscService\Modules" />

After that your pull server should be up and running.  You should see something like this if you navigate to http://yourpullserver/psdscpullserver.svc
PullServerDefaultUrl
 
 

11 Responses to " Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server "

  1. […] Configuring the Pull Server (REST version) […]

  2. Brett Slaski says:

    I noticed that though Add-WindowsFeature Dsc-Service will add IIS to the server, management tools are not added and I needed to add them separately so I may add website, etc. for the pull server.

  3. […] Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server […]

  4. […] Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server […]

  5. […] Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server (Steven Murawski) […]

  6. […] to all versions, setting up the website and application pool in IIS. This process is detailed at https://powershell.org/2013/10/03/building-a-desired-state-configuration-pull-server/ , and there are several examples of scripts to perform these steps out on the internet as well […]

  7. […] meanly used the blog post of Steven Murawski Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server, but there were some point in there that needed clarification. In the walk-through below I will […]

  8. Could you provide an example of using the PULL server with REST Clients? Everything I’ve found shows configuring the clients to use SMB and guids which seem to overly complicate the matter.