Re: Staging rollouts to production environment

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, bthomas@shopping.com wrote:

> "If the file /etc/cfengine.stagehost exists, consider yourself a
> staging server, otherwise, you're production."
> 
> Either way, this kind of tweak has the nice effect of being able to
> manage it through a manual process (i.e. touch the file by hand, presto,
> it's a staging client), or through cfengine (For this group of servers,
> add the stagehost file, from now on it's a staging client).
> 
> The relevant portions of the update.conf are:
> 
> --
> groups:
> 
>   cfstagehost          = ( FileExists(/etc/cfengine.stagehost) )

I understand what you're doing, but I'm not sure why you wouldn't just
say:

groups:
 cfstagehost = ( alpha beta gamma )

in your non-RPM groups definition, instead of pushing a special /etc
file out to alpha, beta, and gamma.  Then you have no custom /etc
files, and everything is in the configuration files that are
automatically distributed across all your machines.  If you need the
special /etc file you can always touch it yourself if the cfstagehost
class is defined, and remove it otherwise.

Then the problem is reduced to propagating a small groups file (which
is included by the main groups definition, which is in the RPM if I
understand correctly) by update.conf or rsync or whatever mechanism
you like.

Am I missing something?  I hope this was helpful...

Ted