When I first wrote my cron classes, I created a separate class for each cron job, eg.

class app::queue_processor::cron::cacheload {

    include
        user::base

    cron { cacheload:
        command => '/usr/bin/php /app/queue_processor/utils/cacheload.php account > /dev/null 2>&1',
        hour    => '0',
        minute  => '0',
        user    => 'app',
        require => User['app']
    }

}

I then created another class for each profile which includes all the required cron jobs, eg:

class profile::partition::cron {
    include
        app::queue_processor::cron::cacheload
        app::queue_processor::cron::send_move_backlog
}

This all works fine and the cron jobs are installed as required. However, I recently needed to remove the cacheload cron job from all machines.

This is simply a matter of specifying "ensure => absent" to the cron type. I therefore needed some way of passing this to the cron job classes.

I did this by creating a higher-level cron class, app::queue_processor::cron containing a definition app::queue_processor::cron::job which takes an ensure parameter that defaults to "present" if not specified. It looks like this:

class app::queue_processor::cron {}
define app::queue_processor::cron::job($ensure = present) {

    include user::base

    case $name {
        cacheload: {
            cron { $name:
                command => '/usr/bin/php /app/queue_processor/utils/cacheload.php account > /dev/null 2>&1',
                hour    => '0',
                minute  => '0',
                user    => 'app',
                require => User['app']
                ensure  => $ensure
            }
        }

        send_move_backlog: {
            cron { $name:
                # similar cron definition here
            }
        }

        default: { fail("Unknown queue_processor cron job type: $name") }
    }
}

I use this new define in the profile::partition::cron class like this:

class profile::partition::cron {
    include app::queue_processor::cron
    app::queue_processor::cron::job{ send_move_backlog: }
    app::queue_processor::cron::job{ cacheload: ensure => absent }
}

Here's how I bulk create certificates for a bunch of new nodes named b001-b034:

for n in $(seq -w 1 34); do
    ssh-keygen -q -t rsa -f b0$n -C '' -N ''
done