Re: syncing files....

[Nate Campi]

On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 04:56:25PM -0500, John Gray wrote:
> 
> Is there a facility for syncing files in cfengine (I haven't been able 
> to find one).  So for example, when the passwd file has a passwd 
> changed, cfengine would sync it with the masterfiles?

At my site we've always used a wrapper command that checks config files
in and out of RCS before/after editing. If you used such a scheme you
could trigger a sync of the file in question to masterfiles (directly
rsync, or use cfrun to trigger the copy on the remote fileserver, etc).
The beauty of this is that if an upgrade/reinstall wrote out a copy of
passwd that you don't want in masterfiles, it wouldn't sync until you
manually triggered it.
 
> On a similair note, there some things I'd like to collect from the 
> systems (their current package lists and kernel configs are two 
> examples).  Is there a nice way to collect those things so I have a 
> central store of them.  I want to make diaster recovery easier, in fact, 
> that's largely my goal here, to be able to rebuild a system ASAP when a 
> drive dies.  I could certainly write scripts to do this, but I'd rather 
> not have too many independant system going if cfegine will handle it all 
> for me.

The general cfengine take on this is to set up the kernel and packages
using cfengine in the first place. That way if you need to rebuild the
host, cfengine does it all for you. 

Often this means retrofitting cfengine on top of an existing setup, to
start pushing out the *existing* configs/build. It's worth it, since it
makes it so easily rebuilt.
-- 
Nate

"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite 
you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - 
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar(1894) - Samuel Clemens