question about architecting a cfengine implementation

[Kurt Lieber]

I'm looking at implementing cfengine to manage the infrastructure servers
of the Gentoo Linux project. (www.gentoo.org)  My goal is to have one
master server that maintains and distributes the configration files for all
our other servers.  My question is regarding the best way to do this.

I'm not sure I want critical files like /etc/ stuff being updated remotely.
So instead, I was thinking about having a two-tiered architecture.  The
first tier would distribute all configuration files to each server, but
they would be stored in a separate directory (/var/cfengine/files/etc/ for
/etc/ files, for instance) 

I would also push out the cfagent.conf files to all the remote servers this
way as well.

Then, I would set up the *local* version of cfengine to actually implement
those changes via their local cfagent.conf file. (copying
/var/cfengine/files/etc/ to /etc/ and so on)  This allows me to easily pull
one server out of the cfengine rotation simply by removing it's local
cfengine cron job.

Opinions on this design?  Is there a better way to do it?  I'm still new to
cfengine, so please let me know if there's an easier way to do all this. :)

Thanks.

--kurt

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