help-cfengine
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: cfengine darwin (MacOS X) patch


From: John Valdes
Subject: Re: cfengine darwin (MacOS X) patch
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 20:13:20 -0500

On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 12:02:41PM -0600, Michael J. Carter wrote:

> It seems that all the 'meat' in osx is buried in
> NetInfo - which isn't very well documented. How are you planning to use
> cfengine with OSX?

We're not sure yet.  At this stage, we were basically testing to see
whether cfengine would compile & run with OSX w/o worrying about how
we'd use it.  (The answer to this seems to be yes! :) ).  We mostly
use cfengine for automating software & patch installation on our
various Unix platforms (mainly solaris & linux at the moment); it
remains to be seen whether we'll be doing this with OSX.

As far as NetInfo goes, there are command line utilities for
manipulating the info therein.  See nidump(1), niload(1) & niutil(1)
for starters.  For changing information that resides in netinfo, it
may be possible to use editfiles: on text versions of the data, and
then load it into NetInfo using niload with shellcommands:.  I'd image
(NeXT|Open)Step users (or NIS, for that matter) have worked on this
problem already?

It seems that the bulk of the information in NetInfo is accessed by
the usual library routines (eg, getpwent(), gethostbyname(), etc)
indirectly via a daemon called lookupd.  lookupd seems to be a
typical nameservice type daemon and can be configured to lookup
information from different sources (NetInfo, NIS, DNS, flat files,
etc), so if you don't want to deal with NetInfo at all (probably a
good thing :) ), in theory at least, it may be possible to configure
lookupd to only consult flat files, in which case you can use cfengine
to directly manage those files.  See the manpage for lookupd for
details, or its source on www.opensource.apple.com (I think it's
there; I can't seem to get through at the moment, due to local
problems...) 

John



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]