Re: Other possible cfengine weak areas?

[David Douthitt]

On Thu, 2004-01-22 at 06:41, Systems Administrator wrote:

> -     Packages.  This is only kind of a cfengine thing.  I wanted a 
>       multi-host package management system which would choose packages 
>       based on cfengine classes.  Hopefully I'll be able to post this 
>       sometime.  But it works.  PostgreSQL/Perl

I do this already.  Set up a class (such as "web" for web servers) and
put each host into each class.  Then, as I use apt-rpm, I do the
following:

web::
    "apt-get -qyy <rpms....>"

> -     Disks: I wanted basically just to:
>       -       Be alerted when a disk is more than 80% full
>       -       Be able to set fstab options
>       -       List partitions that didn't fit a certain pattern
>       ...and I wanted to be able to do this for non-NFS filesystems

I don't know that cfengine is best for this; I use Nagios and SGI
Performance CoPilot (PCP) - both can do this, and PCP offers
considerable flexibility.

> -     Service Management.  I wanted something that would do the 
>       following pseudocode:
>       if(! service started) { start service }
>       It wasn't too hard a script; I just called the Fedora "service" 
>       script, first with the "status" command, and then the "start" 
>       command.

Why not just:

servicename::
    "service start zzz"

If the service is already started, starting it again is supposed to be
handled properly by the script...