Re: Querying clients

[PAUL WILLIAMSON]

>>> "Alexander Jolk" <alexj@buf.com> 12/09/05 9:12 AM >>>
> 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.

I do the configuration generation via cfg2html and have cfengine 
pick those up and put them into a directory structure on the 
cfengine master server.  Extrememly useful for all sorts of things, 
even when jumpstarting a server or replicating servers.

Paul