kickstart and cfengine (was: Re: Disconnected laptop CFEngine ?)

[Ed Brown]

In the past, we've seen occasional hanging during kickstart when rpms
were installed within cfengine in %post. (Usually, not always, the hung
process was actually 'minilogd', which if killed from the alternate
console was enough to allow cfagent and kickstart to continue to
completion.)  We are not now seeing any such problems, with cfengine
2.1.11, and RHEL3WSU4.  

However you install and run cfengine for the first time, I think it's
important to reboot the box at least once, to know that it still boots,
that services are configured to start as appropriate and configured
correctly, etc.  If you build/rebuild many machines, installing/running
cfengine in %post is tremendously convenient: kickstart, reboot once,
and you're up and running.  

The key things to working successfully with %post are to do
error-checking each step of the way (like any good programming), to
provide feedback to the installer, and make it flexible, which helps
when you are developing the script, and, even long after it's been
written, like for example, when you forget to remove a key on the server
for a machine you are rebuilding, or forget to add a new one to the
access lists in cfservd.conf.  For an example of this kind of %post
scripting to install cfengine, see the thread "Re: running modules in
%post section of a redhat ES3 kickstart?" from Jan 26th.

-Ed



On Mon, 2005-02-07 at 10:32, Jeremy Mates wrote:
> * Josh Smith <jbs@cacr.caltech.edu>
> > You can also do it in the %post section of a Kickstart install (or the
> > analogus section of a Jumpstart install), which is useful if there are
> > things you want to do before the system reboots for the first time.
> 
> I've seen problems running cfengine from %post under RedHat Enterprise
> Linux, probably due to db4 upgrades. cfagent hangs, has to be killed
> off manually.
> 
> I currently do as little as possible under %post, and among other things
> set cfagent to run at startup:
> 
>   cat <<EOF > /etc/rc.d/rc.local
> #!/bin/sh
> /usr/sbin/cfagent --no-splay --define sys_startup &
> touch /var/lock/subsys/local
> EOF
> chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.local
> 
> For Mac OS X, I use a StartupItems script written by the CFEngine.pkg. I
> am experimenting with "sys_power" and "sys_network" classes on my OS X
> laptop, though the current scripts are kluges.