Re: Quick cfengine poll...

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 12:29:38PM -0800, Andrew Mayhew wrote:
> They also seem to have problems with cfengine's ability (or in their
> view lack of ability) to scale to very large scale systems.

I don't manage a large system but the way I use cfengine would
definitely scale to such systems.

My colleagues have limited *nix skills but do sometimes need to
check/change the config of systems I have installed.  So I set about
creating simple web interfaces for this purpose.  Installing and
maintaining those web interfaces on all the different Linux boxes was a
chore I didn't want, though.  Add to that the fact that I didn't want
any kind of web server on some of those boxes (e.g. the transparent
firewall boxes).

My solution to this has been to create one box that acts as a master
configurator.  It has the web interface.  To change the firewall set-up
on box X you use the appropriate form on the master box.  When you press
"Apply", the web application saves the file and then runs cfengine on
box X.  cfengine pulls down the new config file.  And most importantly,
cfengine then does whatever is needed on box X to put the new config
file into effect (restarting daemons, clearing out old caches etc).
It's the fact that cfengine can react to events in context that makes it
much more than a fancy version of rsync.

This is still in development but working well.  It would be even more
useful in a very large site.  I would be very surprised if anything that
your colleagues built allowed me to build this on top of it.

-- 
Bruce

It is impolite to tell a man who is carrying you on his shoulders that
his head smells.