Cfengine ?

[Florian Festi]

> 	I was asked for a question: how can I use kickstart to apply any 
> "patch" (or another change) on already installed hosts ?
> Maybe cfengine, I mean (but I haven't enough time to apprehend his concepts, 
> I think)...
> What are you using for ?

We have developed a system that allows to install various file formats 
easily in post and to be able to simply keep the install tree and the 
installed computers in sync.

We mount an directory via NFS in %post and execute some script found in 
the postscripts/ subdir. These scripts do varios things ans start with 
numbers (Sys V init like) to get called in the right order:

  * Install RPM, TARs, patches contained in a subdir per file format.
  * Copy a directory tree to / containing edited config files.
  * Doing some configuration, like calling chkconfig
  * inserting this

To be more flexible we use several directories (I call packages) with the 
same structure.


In addition we use an update mechnism that keeps an version number per 
package on each maschine. This version number is kept uptodate in the 
install tree, so newly installed maschines do not install updates.
Each package has an update/ dir which contains updates in the form 
MAJOR.MINORNAME. MAJOR and MINOR are numbers NAME is ignored. A smal 
python script installes all new updates and increases the local version 
number.

Updates can be files or symlinks. Some known name patterns are treated 
special like: *.rpm, *.tar, *.tgz, *.tar.gz, *.patch */files/* (links to 
files in our tree of changed files). Everything else is treated as an 
script. We even have a script that sets the 
symlinks with the right number.

This allows to fix the install tree and simply set an symlink an the 
new/changed file in most cases.

There is some documentation available

http://w3studi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dokumentation/wiki/KickStart
http://w3studi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/dokumentation/wiki/FeDora1

but it is a bit outdated and not in ane excellent state... Most parts 
should be English some passages are still German

 	cu

 		Florian Festi


Btw: Right now we install most RPM with yum and a RPM list. This seams to 
be very slow but more stable and less error prone that Anaconda.