Re: A good location for flag files & on-demand per-user apps

[Tim Nelson]

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Jason Edgecombe wrote:

> Hello again,
>
> Is there a good location in the cfengine directory tree or somewhere else to 
> put flag files? I looking to set up two sets of flags, permanent and 
> semi-permanent. Permanent flags would be ones that specify which department a 
> machine is in. Semi-permanent flags would be tidy'ed after some time.

	I'm using a skeleton system which mirrors a skeleton filesystem 
onto the individual machines, depending on which class they're in.  This 
is part of cfengine-masterconf (http://arpmats.sourceforge.net/ and go to 
cfengine-masterconf).

> The background of this is that our college-level work with cfengine has 
> caught the attention of campus IT as a possibly solution to manage our Mac's 
> which currently aren't managed. The campus uses Novell Zenworks for windows 
> management. One feature of Zenworks is that when a user logs in, applications 
> that are associated with that user are immediately pushed out. We have a few 
> roaming users who can benefit from this and Campus IT would be more amenable 
> if I can prove that this is possible.
>
> I would prefer that all application be local and installed everywhere, but 
> some licenses forbid this and we just have too many applications and we don't 
> have a network storage share in place for all of the Mac's.
>
> I was thinking that in the system login script, we check the username against 
> a list of usernames and associated applications. If a user is associated with 
> an application, then the correct semi-permanent flag file would be touched. 
> Cfengine would then install the application based on the existence of the 
> flag file and tidy the semi-permanent flag files. We could even remove the 
> application if the flag files doesn't exist. This would handle our roaming 
> users. The only catches I see are as follows:
> 1. how to inform/lock out the user while the application is being pushed out.

	Maybe roll out a script to all machines that just says "please 
wait for installation", and when the user logs in, put in a softlink to it 
which has the name of the executeable that they want.

> 2. how to do it immediately upon login.

        sudo cfagent -q

        :)

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Kind Regards,
 
Tim Nelson
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