How to prevent puppet to override change made on a linux server?

I use timedatectl on a host to change from CST to EST.

After making the change, puppet will change it back after a few minutes.

How can I prevent puppet from reverting the change?

How to prevent puppet to override any changes you made on the linux server?

You shouldn't.

You automate your system management with Puppet (or any other system management tool) to prevent exactly that: sysadmins making manual, temporary and/or most importantly: undocumented changes to systems.

If that systems needs to be in a different state, then make that change persistent via puppet.

Now if you're manually debugging something, you can temporarily disable the puppet agent until you found the exact settings you want to adjust. That should prevent puppet from reverting any adjustments you're making while you're still making them.

But that should result in:

• an alert in your monitoring
• once the correct settings have been found, you update them on the puppet server
• enable the puppet agent again
• puppet wil revert most (if not all) changes you made while debugging while only allowing the system to keep the changes that you also adjusted on the puppet server