Re: Bugs and features

[Andrew Mayhew]

If you really want to use rsync from cfengine, without using shellcommands
and writing scripts, I wrote this nasty patch a while back to do just that.
I'm not going to support it, since it was mostly an academic excercise, but
it does allow you to keep and use your regular cfengine copy: section and
depending on some variables set in the control: section cfengine will either
use its native copy method, or call an external method (shell command).
I've only ever really tested it calling rsync, but you could probably do
something equally silly as to have cfengine use rcp or scp to copy the files
over.

But that's all just silliness anyway.  Once cfengine stopped barfing on
files with the word "Bad" at the beginning of a line, replacing its
transport became fairly irrelevant.  The problem that I see with using rsync
or even just its algorithm is that while it can use your network more
efficiently by only sending diverentials, the figuring out what the
differential blocks to send can create a significant burden on the machine
serving the files.  Which in the long run means that you can't serve as many
simultaneous clients because of server load.  Besides, putting that workload
on the server means that you've stepped away from the general philosophy of
cfengine which puts scalability before most things.  And the only way to
scale is to rely on a central server to do any work as little as possible.

Oh, the aforementioned patch <cough> <cough> lives at
http://icewire.com/cfengine/patches/
Don't blame me if it melts your machine.

--Andrew Mayhew <amayhew@icewire.com>

On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 03:19:51PM -0700, Robert Shaw wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 24, 2001 at 05:48:17PM -0400, Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> > I respectfully submit that rsync is fast, straightforward, and
> > efficient for a whole lot of tasks.  cfengine's copies are an
> > alternate approach, but rsync's approach is valid and quite useful to
> > many users.  Also, rsync can run over ssh.
> > 
> > I already run rsync as a shellcommand.  By the lack of response I
> > would guess I'm the only one that is interested in a rsync section.
> 
> I would like to see an rsync section.
> 
> -Robert
> 
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