Re: Another clue, if anyone has any suggestions

[Ed Brown]

Paul,

My best advice to you is to start simply, and proceed in small steps.
Trying to debug problems with cfrun on a first time installation is just
asking for frustration.  Read the docs and examples at cfengine.org and
cfwiki.org.  When you have problems, go back and read the relevant
sections again.  (I've got a dog-eared hardcopy of the reference manual
in reach.) 

As for the small steps, here's a possible sequence:
 - You've got cfservd on your policy server running, this is good.  
 - Can you run cfagent there, on the same machine: cfagent talking to
cfservd on the same host?  You'll work out most of your issues with
syntax, access control, organization of your source files, etc.
 - Then, try running cfagent on a remote host.  This has to be working
ok, before cfrun has a chance of working (and, before anybody has a
chance of helping you diagnose problems). Reporting problems when
executing cfrun, without saying whether cfagent on that targetmachine
works, just begs the follow-up question.  If the problem occurs when
running cfagent, report it that way.
 - Only after cfagent is running just fine from the commandline or from
cron or cfexecd on the targetmachine, then work on additional configs to
be able to use cfrun (another cfservd.conf, and cfrun confs).

Regarding the bits of your conf files below: 

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 11:24 -0800, paul beard wrote:
> shellcommands:
>          logger "is this thing on?"

Bad syntax.  The entire shellcommand should be within quotes, and the
command always includes a full path to the executable.

On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 10:29 -0800, paul beard wrote:
> copy:
>          /var/cfengine/inputs/etc/hosts   dest=/etc/hosts

As an organizational suggestion, you probably don't want to keep system 
files that are copied out by cfengine in /var/cfengine/inputs: this 
should contain your cfengine configuration files only, it is cfengine's 
own working directory for configuration files.  Also, by itself, this
will only accomplish a local copy: it will not copy from one machine 
to another.  For that you need a 'server=...' clause, to identify 
where to copy from.

good luck,
Ed