Facts from symlinked folders (facts.d / modules) don't work correctly in Vagrant on Windows

Hello

We've had an issue with using custom facts in Ruby on our Vagrant Windows instance.

Vagrant shared the puppet code with the instance, through it's synced folder feature, which in this case is backed by Virtualbox Shared Folder. Facter tries to canonicalise this directory, and it seems ( haven't dug too much into boost ) that because this is a symlink to a UNC path, that this fails, so the facts don't get included.

If nothing else (I'm not sure if we can do without or work around the canonical() call), then there could be better logging around this; using facter with --custom-dir didn't reveal anything useful, while using the FACTERLIB environment variable revealed the following debug entry, which isn't a lot of help in debugging why the path won't be searched ( I initially thought it was lack of a suitable ruby runtime ):

2016-09-22 03:05:43.409832 DEBUG puppetlabs.facter - path "C:/tmp/vagrant-puppet/environments/production/site/games_dir/lib/facter" will not be searched for custom facts: The request is not supported.