Re: cfengine, debconf and ldap

[Brendan Strejcek]

Steve Wray wrote:

> debconf is set up to query these databases and to *try* not to be
> interactive (sometimes this seems a lot harder than it should be :)
>
> cfengine takes care of the package installation with a
> dselect-upgrade. The package selection state list for each host is
> maintained on the cfserver this list is (currently) manually updated
> by the sysadmin and then a cfrun command issued; the client pulls down
> its latest selection states, runs a dpkg --set-selections from it and
> then performs an apt-get dselect-upgrade. Debconf gets its answers
> directly from the central LDAP database.

I solved this problem using the sledgehammer method: get dpkg, apt-get,
debconf, etc to just shut up and install the package with defaults (if
you set enough --force-yes, DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive, etc, options
it is possible to get it to actually be noninteractive). Then I use
copy, editfiles, and other cfengine actions to do any configuration I
need.

I think the Debian package tools were really optimized for single-user
use, not infrastructures.

Best,
Brendan

--
Senior System Administrator
The University of Chicago
Department of Computer Science

http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/people/brendan

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~brendan