Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Michael DeHaan
<mdehaan(a)redhat.com> wrote:
> Harry Hoffman wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I'm starting to look at the built in Config Mgmt with templates for
>> situations where cfengine/puppet cannot (for whatever reasons) be used.
>>
>> I guess the first thing that came to mind is to have a default location
>> for templates so that it would be available via variables to cobbler.
>> Seems like: /var/lib/cobbler/templates might be a good choice, any thoughts?
>>
>>
> Most templates live in /etc/cobbler thus far, so to differentiate,
> perhaps /var/lib/cobbler/cfg_templates
>
>
I was wondering if this is where a voltronic add-on might be useful.
Cobbler/cheetah serve as the template master but something like say:
Kheap Information System Setup (kiss) is an executable that runs and
configures the system from that.
We've added this into koan presently, and the code is /very/ minimal.
This should keep the logic seperate
where it needs to be without having to add all kinds of func-ee extra
syntax to cobbler for something it didn't do. Instead Cobbler serves
'snippets' and those snippets get pushed down.
I'm not sure I follow.
(A) there's not a lot of extra syntax. (B) this is something Cobbler
/does/ do now, it's basically reusing all the shiny Cheetah
templating bits for some additional purposes.
Cobbler serves the config files, because if it only served the snippets,
we'd actually need more work in another tool that would
make integration involve manual setup. Instead, we have a very simple
extra flag to koan, can reuse all the infrastructure
there, and it's really a extra-minimal thing to get that going.
To clarify, if you have a cobbler server, this requires zero additional
setup and is there working automatically, and also requires
zero additional daemons, ports, or anything like that. If you don't
want it, you just don't use the --template-files flag and it
stays out of your way.
> Though currently templates can live anywhere, so the main purpose of
> having a default directory would be to save typing
>
> --template-files=foo.template=/etc/whereto/onfilesystem.conf
> versus
>
--template-files=/var/lib/cobbler/cfg_templates/foo.template=/etc/whereto/onfilesystem.conf
>
>
>> We do things (maybe a bit) different so I don't know if something as
>> generic as webserver.template might work... but we could certainly take
>> a standard httpd.conf file and replace all of the things you'd normally
>> fill in with variables defined via ksopts (or some other mechanism).
>>
>>
>>
> --ks-meta ? Yes...
>
>
>> I'm trying to come up with some real world examples and would appreciate
>> any ideas you might have.
>>
>> In cfengine, we do simply things like replace "#ServerName
>>
www.example.com:80" with "ServerName
www.my.tld:80". Perhaps this
works,
>> perhaps it doesn't. As a small scale config-mgmt system I think it would
>> work for us, but would it work for anyone else?
>>
>>
> This would look like
>
> ServerName $hostname:80
>
> if we just used one of cobbler's built in variables for the purpose.
>
> or possibly
>
> ServerName $getVar("hostname","default.example.org"):80
>
>
>> We'd also use func, and func-inventory to trac changes over time...
>> func-inventory creates a file-tracker directory in each system repo so
>> I'm guessing that we can use it to at least allow for browsing of changes.
>>
>> Also, if your backup system is a large as our's then you realize it can
>> sometimes take a long time to pull stuff off of the backup server and
>> compare.
>>
>> Using a file tracker would allow us to check the repo 1st and then move
>> on to the backup tapes afterward.
>>
>>
> Possible... I'm wondering what other interactions between the file
> templating engine and func would make sense.
>
> One logical extension is a simple func module to tell machines to update
> themselves.
>
> We've also talked about making a func overlord module for pushing the
> files out, so it happens over func's secure (& somewhat better logged)
> channels (as an option).... though we should certaintly build more
> logging into koan too.
>
>> I'd appreciate any thoughts, criticisms, suggestions that you might have.
>>
>> I also would love to see some real world examples that ppl might have.
>>
>> I'm happy to share ours, in a personally redacted way.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Harry
>>
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