Re: Package management, multicast, and a Newbie question :)

[Systems Administrator]

Re: RPM package management:

        It depends on what level you want to do it at.  One page I always
found cool was:
http://astro.uchicago.edu/~davidr/cfengine-tools/lisa-paper_html/

        Now sure, I wouldn't do it their way, because I'm only dealing
with a few linux boxen at the moment, but it's a cool idea.


Chris (Ducky) Chapin wrote:

> As far as future cfservd methods, I'd absolutely love a bit torrent
> style of distributed file synchronization. cfservd would be coordinator
> (tracker in bt lingo) and seed clients as needed. This would scale
> enormously as been proven for large file distribution of quite a few
> products since the availability and performace goes UP as more clients
> are added.
>
> http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent if you're unfamiliar.
>
> I'm interested in technologies like this because we've got more than 2200
> centrally managed unix hosts that need access to roughly 100M of
> configuration and binary data. They range from desktops to lab machines,
> and with generic compute servers definately in the minority.

        Wouldn't this be better done as a multicast?

        Now for my newbie question.  With the packages I've chosen to
install with Redhat, it believes that its hostname is
localhost.localdomain.  No prob, all I need to do is modify
/etc/sysconfig/network.  But I was hoping to have cfengine do this
automatically by doing a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address.  So I have
a section that looks a bit like this:

shellcommands:
        "/usr/bin/host $(ipaddress)  | awk '{print $NF}'"

        Ok, so far, so good.  But how do I get the output back into
cfengine so that I can use editfiles on it.  Or am I falling prey to the
old syndrome of "When you have a lovely new hammer, everything looks like
a skull"?  Should I just be directing the output into the file with >> and
removing the other line after?

        Thanks all :)

--
Tim Nelson
Systems Administrator
Sunet Internet
Tel: +61 3 5241 1155
Fax: +61 3 5241 6187
Web: http://www.sunet.com.au/
Email: sysadmin@sunet.com.au