Re: Querying clients

[Alexander Jolk]

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.

I'm doing this for two purposes: lspci and dmidecode.  That way, I 
always have an up-to-date inventory of all my machines on the cfengine 
server, in case I need to quickly find a serial number or a specific 
model of graphics card for example.

What I'm doing is I have every machine generate its files into 
/var/cfengine/collect/$(hostname).pci, and then copy this whole 
directory to the server.  In order to limit the load on the server, I'm 
staging the copy over a tree structure in fact, the server copies from 
five machines that in turn, copy from five others each, and so on.

I'm using the same mechanism to send my local ssh host keys to the 
server, where I construct a known_hosts file to distribute, all entirely 
automated.

Alex


--
Alexander Jolk  * BUF Compagnie * alexj@buf.com
Tel +33-1 42 68 18 28  *  Fax +33-1 42 68 18 29