Re: Cfengine and package management databases

[Systems Administrator]

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Chris (Ducky) Chapin wrote:

> I think I mentioned this already not too long ago, but here it is for
> completeness:
>
> We had a small test environment here using dpkg and apt to both track
> class inheritance (nearly empty packages, with maybe importable cfengine
> scripts) and patch levels (some class packages might "require" higher
> versions of binary packages, etc). Dpkg/apt was ported to Solaris and
> during install all the Sun packages would get imported into that database
> so within cfengine we could, for instance, do something based on the
> SUNWusx class being active.
>
> Our test worked ok, except we determined the packaging process was
> prohibitive for our small group - we're basically 3 or 4 admins creating

        That's why I (running only Linux) intend to rely heavily on the
Redhat and Fedora RPMs.  Even now, in the pre-cfengine state, I'd only
have 15 packages (at the most) which don't come with Redhat 7.2, and when
I switch to Redhat 9 + Fedora (when I do the cfengine rollout), it'll be
only one or two, hopefully.  But I'd thought about this before I even
started with cfengine, because I read the following (from the link I
included):

-----
        Since a large fraction of the computers we're responsible for are
Sun SPARCs running Solaris, we started developing on our Solaris machines
first. After making and installing a Solaris pkg package for RPM, we
thought of all the third party software that we would want to install,
downloaded the source code, and compiled them into RPM packages. This took
about two months and was by far the most time consuming step of the entire
process.
-----

        ...and there only appear to be two of them.

        :)

> baselines for 2000+ hosts for other, more frontline groups to build off
> of. And we also found that cfengine didn't like activating the more than
> 500 classes we were using. =)

        Hmm.  Now *that* may be a future scalability problem for me.  But
then again, I only have 20 hosts at the moment... :).

> Something in-band (ie, cfservd) to distribute the dependency hierarchy
> would be better, as would a simpler method to create said hierarchy.
> cfengine has some of the tools built-in to describe the interdependencies,
> but not things like conflict resolution.
>
> A full SQL database is overkill and also adds complexity to the
> configuration system.

        Well some people seem to have done it :).  While it may be a full
SQL database, it seems to be a fairly simple one in most cases.  Those
people I mentioned seemed to only have 4 tables, and I'll also have 4,
although a different 4 :).

        :)

--
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