Re: gathering reports

[Tim Nelson]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, Michael Grubb wrote:

> I am fairly new to cfengine, I did some searching of the mailing list and 
> wiki and didn't find anything quite like what I'm wanting to do.
>
> I am trying to build a solution, using cfengine as the framework, for 
> auditing host configurations and then based on the results of the audit,
> bring the host into compliance with the policy.  The second part is easy. 
> But I'm a little lost on the first part.  I'm not quite sure the best 
> approach to take with reporting, and then taking the data from each system 
> and rolling that into a report.  For instance I would like to know what 
> version of script x is running on our hosts, but I don't want to have to look 
> at the output
> of each host individually I would like to gather the information from each 
> host and roll that into a report.  My specific question to you is, what is 
> the best way of getting this information back to the "master" host.  At first 
> I thought of having a section that would create a temporary report file that 
> can be written to by all the different checks that have to be done, and then
> having the "master" host copy this report file from the "run" host and then 
> roll the reports that way, but then the problem is, the master host doesn't 
> necessarily know what the temporary file's name is.  Another option that 
> could work, is using syslog to collect the data, but I'd rather stay away 
> from that if I can.

	cfengine is designed so that you don't *have* to collect the 
data back to a central location, because central locations should be as 
small as possible to allow for scaling.

	Having said that, if you dump a report for the entire machine into 
a file, you can use copy to transfer that back to the central machine; 
just specify the source and destination the other way around (and get your 
cfservd to allow uploads for that directory).

        HTH,

--
Kind Regards,
 
Tim Nelson
Server Administrator
 
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