Re: Querying clients

[Steve Wray]

Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 09, 2005 at 12:43:04PM +1300, Steve Wray wrote:
>
> > It is still useful to be able to collect data on the existing state of a 
> > machine and pass that back to the cfengine server. I can think of *lots* 
> > of reasons one might want to do this.
>
>
> Please share.  I can't think of anything that cfengine can do on the server
> that it can't do on the client.

Not necessarily for cfengines direct benefit.

Eg. I'm in the process of converging a set of debian hosts to management 
under cfengine.

I have a partial system for doing package upgrades and at the moment I 
would very much like to pull in, to the cfengine server, each hosts 
current package selection states so that these can be compared and I can 
use these to work toward convergence, detect implicit host classes etc.

I agree that once a set of hosts are under cfengine control and 
converged the need is much reduced, but what a lot of people tend to 
forget is that bringing hosts to convergence takes a lot of careful 
examination of how each host is configured; finding the implicit classes 
and making them explicit.




--
There is nothing more important to good government than good education.