homepattern, directory and copy

[Steve Wray]

There appears to be an inconsistency in the way that I can use home 
patterns and difficulty assigning ownership of the content of home 
directories.


We have a bunch of servers with no NFS mounts at all, yet I want to take 
advantage of cfengines 'homepattern'



control:
   HomeMaintenance::
      # This is where files to go into users home directories are held:
      master_home    = ( "$(client_mastercf)/config/home" )

      # Although we don't use NFS, homepattern appears to need
      # a mountpattern so I just give /
      mountpattern   = ( "/" )

      # Since /home is where the home directories go, this together with
      # the mount pattern should mean that this 'expands' to /home
      homepattern    = ( "home" )

      # As you will see, despite using homepattern, I still seem to have
      # to define a list of home directories:
      homedirs = ( ExecResult(/bin/ls /home/) )

      # I am illustrating the perceived inconsistency between copy and
      # directories:
      actionsequence = ( copy directories )


copy:
   HomeMaintenance::
      $(master_home)/testfile
         # In the case of copy, we can use the 'home' pseudo-variable
         # which cfengine derives from the mountpattern and homepattern:
         dest=home/testfile
         mode=0600
         type=checksum
         server=$(policyhost)


directories:
   HomeMaintenance::
      # Here we have to use the explicit path and the list
      # defined above:
      /home/$(homedirs)
         owner=LastNode
         inform=true
      # this only works for the top-level home directory,
      # not subdirectories, there is no recursion.

      # This does not appear to work:
      home
         owner=LastNode
         inform=true
       # and produces these messages:
       # cfengine:testbed: Unknown user home
       # cfengine:testbed:   touching /home
       # cfengine:testbed: Owner of /home was 0, setting to -1

      # This appears to do nothing at all:
      home/
         owner=LastNode
         inform=true

      # This applies to all of the *contents* of
      # all first-level subdirectories of /home/
      # and tries to apply to files as well, giving errors:
      home/*
         owner=LastNode
         inform=true

# and produces this kind of noise (excuse the linewrapping):
#cfengine:ldap: Cannot make /home/stevew/.bashrc -
# /home/stevew/.bashrc is not a directory! (use forcedirs=true)
#cfengine:ldap: Cannot make /home/stevew/.bash_profile -
# /home/stevew/.bash_profile is not a directory!
# (use forcedirs=true)

# ie its trying to apply the directories action to files
# besides which, directories isn't recursive so even if this
# worked, pattern-wise, it still wouldn't work for me.

# I had been hoping that the files action might work, but no:
files:
   HomeMaintenance::
      # This does nothing
      home
         action=fixall
         inform=true

#The logs do show:
# cfengine:testbed: Checking files in /home/stevew/...

# but it does nothing even thought they are (currently) all owned
# by root, presumably because no owner= is set,
# however only 'directories' uses LastNode so I'm at a loss how
# to get the files action to correctly set ownerships of homedir
# contents!


Is it possible to enforce ownership of the contents of home directories 
directly from cfengine without resorting to shellcommands?

So far, the only way I have found to set ownership of a home directories 
*contents* to the owner of that home directory is to copy the content 
from the server into it that home directory.

I am guessing that I'll have to write a small shell script or something, 
but I sure hope that someone can either point out my error or provide a 
workaround!
:)



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