Re: Administering a thousand hosts

[John Borwick]

Jamie Wilkinson wrote:
> To build new machines, check out Red Hat's kickstart.  Have a cfengine
> package (I recommend those from Dag Wieers repository,
> http://dag.wieers.com/packages/cfengine ) installed in the %post section and
> get the machine enrolled and updating from the beginning.

FWIW, we use the below in our %post to run cfengine through 'rc.local' 
on first boot.  -DInit sets "Init" for our site, which means to us that 
it's OK to initialize all the network interfaces and do other things 
that might break a production system.

I have had a bad experience running cfengine in the post directly, 
because your environment is so limited.  We built our own RPM that has 
our site's "update.conf" and server public keys; when you install it 
with up2date it pulls down cfengine, too, and is ready to contact our 
main cfengine server to copy its real configuration.  yum, up2date, or 
even 'wget URL && rpm -ivh' would all work in its stead.

%post
# FIRST BOOT
mv /etc/rc.d/rc.local /etc/rc.d/rc.local.sav
cat <<"RC_LOCAL" > /etc/rc.d/rc.local
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/up2date --solvedeps=wfu-cfengine
cfagent -Kvq -DInit
mv /etc/rc.d/rc.local.sav /etc/rc.d/rc.local
RC_LOCAL
chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local


Yours,
John
--
           John Borwick
       System Administrator
      Wake Forest University | web  http://www.wfu.edu/~borwicjh
      Winston-Salem, NC, USA | GPG key ID             0x797326D5

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