Re: Other possible cfengine weak areas?

[David Douthitt]

On Thursday 22 January 2004 11:46 pm, Tim Nelson wrote:
> On 22 Jan 2004, David Douthitt wrote:
> > 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....>"
>
>       Hmm.  I hadn't considered doing it that way :).  But I can think
> of a few advantages of my way versus what you've described.
> -     My way will remove packages from the servers if you remove them
>       from the list

This method doesn't do that...

> -     My way will automatically install the newest version of the
>       packages

It does, however, do this.  In fact, using apt-get (part of apt-rpm) 
will download not only the specified RPMs but all necessary required 
RPMs, and the lastest version to boot.  This is assuming that you 
have apt set up to download from a site which carries all of this - 
which freshrpms.net does for Red Hat and Yellow Dog.

I would like something that removes RPMs as you said - I think using 
the inverted form would work:

web:
    "apt-get -qqy install apache"

!web:
    "rpm -e apache"

...or would that be too much?

I was thinking I should write a script to handle some of this (in Ruby 
of course) and send it a list of RPMs with a leading + or - and let 
it remove and add as appropriate.  Thus you could specify what a 
particular server looks like, and replicate it elsewhere.