Re: cfengine as a package distributor? (fwd)

[Tim Nelson]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Christian Pearce wrote:

> 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.

 	Assuming that he means make, cfengine probably isn't a complete 
solution; make a package using something else (eg. RPM), and have cfengine kick 
off a build from the latest sources or whatever.

> > 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.

 	There are a variety of approaches.  One starting cfengine setup is 
available from the Arpmats project (http://arpmats.sourceforge.net/ and look 
for cfengine-masterconf) [Disclaimer: I'm the lead developer of Arpmats].

> 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.

 	A great paper, and the basis for Arpmats (see link above). Arpmats may 
be just what the man wants here, but to do what he wants, he'd either have to 
package everything with RPM as the paper describes, or write support for other 
package formats.

> 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.

 	Exactly.  I'd say cfengine+arpmats is great with a coherent package 
management strategy.  cfengine (or another configuration management tool) is 
also worth installing for anyone managing more than 5 unix boxen (irrespective 
of their package management strategy).

 	If he's wanting to continue with a less coherent package management 
strategy, the way I'd approach it is to set classes in one file, and have 
another packages file generated from a perl template (a la 
cfengine-masterconf-pt) which installs whichever packages he wants.

        :)

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Tim Nelson
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