Re: cfengine as a package distributor?

[Christian Pearce]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 04:00 -0800, Phoenix wrote: 
> I am wondering how cfengine could be used to make custom software
> packages? Does anyone have experience with it?

I suppose you could automate making of custome packages.  But I think
you mean distribute.

> As it is now, we have mainly solaris servers but still a rather mixed
> environment (Linux/AIX...etc) with a "homemade", rather old way of
> distributing software packages. It works via "push" so to speak, so I
> am looking for alternative ideas and when I saw cfengine I thought that
> it might be used to do just this (and have the clients "pull" what they
> need from a central package server).
> But I have no clue how to "think" (cfengine-wise)...i.e. How many
> cf-files should I have?, what types?,what classes? HOW should I make
> just ONE server have a special package, etc.

You can use Cfengine to distribute packages.  I know quite a few people
do it.  We have a product that puts a frontend around using Cfengine.
One of the things we do is to distribute packages.

There is packaging installation for rpm and solaris (and maybe others at
this point) built into Cfengine.  Though you wouldn't necessarily have
to use that to install packages.  You could just use shellcommands.  

Here is a link to a paper read back in 2000.  These guys describe what
they did.

http://astro.uchicago.edu/~davidr/cfengine-tools/lisa-paper_html/

A little dated at this point, but it might help you gain a better
understanding.

Sounds like you need to take some time to learnCcfengine and understand
what it can do for you.  It is different from traditional shell
scripting.  Take a look at cfegnine.org and cfwiki.org, read over all
the documentation.  Download cfengine and start taking examples and work
with it.  You need to know whether or not this is a viable solution
before you just try to do package management with Cfengine.

> So...any help appriciated :)
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Help-cfengine@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
-- 
Christian Pearce
http://www.sysnav.com
http://www.commnav.com
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