Re: Taxing cfengine a bit

[Chris (Ducky) Chapin]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Mitch Collinsworth wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Jul 2002, Paul Paradise wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 06:24:31PM -0400, Mitch Collinsworth wrote:
> > > The thing I find interesting about this is that just last month a
> > > sysadmin from Qualcomm was asking me some basic questions about
> > > cfengine.  He said it's not used there.  Maybe you're in different
> > > depts.
> >
> > That was probably me, if it was on this mailing list. :-)
> 
> It was someone else, in person at USENIX.  But if this is that new a
> project then I guess there's not a conflict in stories.  It just seemed
> that anyone with a config file that big would probably have been at it
> for far longer.

As far as our corporate IT staff that went to USENIX, that might have been
either Jim, a developer of our current unix infrastructure, or Deke, our
postmaster extrodinaire. Both of which have contributed some of their time
to what Paul and I have been working on for the past couple weeks.

But they were, for the most part, correct. We haven't been using it. If at
all, it's outside of host administration with a version of cfengine dated
Dec 1997.
 
> > No, actually we're working together, in the same department, on this
> > project. For those interested we're basically marrying the apt/dpkg
> > core with cfengine to create heirarchical class dependencies. We've
> > run into a number of architectural issues with scaling cfengine to the
> > size we need (between 2000-13000 machines), but so far it looks very
> > promising.
> >
> > There's a good chance you'll be seeing featurerequests/patches/bugfixes
> > from Qualcomm sometime in the next 6 months as this progresses....
>
> Cool.

Late into Friday we actually managed to buffer overflow cfengine with a
module. I'd say it handled it quite gracefully. The error message was
generous enough to tell us what we needed to tweak. =)

That 66k file I originally mentioned is actually auto generated. We've got
way too many sysadmins that need way too many tweaks to either way too few
or way too large groups of hosts to be hand edited. Quite literally,
maintaining a single imported cf that contains host class info, as the
exmaple shows in the cfengine reference docs, would be a full-time job in
and of itself.

-Ducky

--

 Christopher 'Ducky' Chapin                        ducky@qualcomm.com
 Unix Systems Administrator - Qualcomm, Inc.           (858) 651-5433
 IT Host Services - AE-209F