Re: [gentoo-server] Genoo Automatistation

[Jose Gonzalez Gomez]

Kurt Lieber wrote:

>On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 05:35:00PM +0200 or thereabouts, Jose Gonzalez Gomez wrote:
>
>
>>Do you have some pointer to any docs regarding this?
>>
>>
>
>Unfortunatley, no.  Documentation is one area of weakness. Once you get the
>hang of cfengine's syntax, however, it's really not that hard to set up and
>get working.  The hardest part is thinking of all the different steps that
>must be done in order to set up a (web|rsync|ftp|mail) server the correct
>way.
>
>
>
    Ok, I had a crazy idea... I'll tell you... I'm trying to setup my 
own company, giving open source related services. This cfengine stuff 
could save me a lot of work, as I could have classes for every kind of 
machine, or even classes for some clients containing all the packages to 
be installed and its configuration. I was writing HOWTOs in order to 
document this, and I had published one of them (regarding central 
authentication using LDAP/Kerberos) but now I'm noticing that all this 
HOWTO stuff is obsolete if you compare it to cfengine.

    Back to the crazy idea, instead of publishing HOWTOs in the Gentoo 
website, you could publish cfengine configurations, or even have some 
cfengine servers available, so people wanting to quickly setup their 
servers or desktop machines with a "officially proposed" configuration, 
could just use that service to have their machines installed and 
configured. Maybe that would be more difficult with desktop machines, 
taking into account all the possibilities, but I think that could be 
pretty easy when talking about servers. That would turn Gentoo into a 
meta-meta-distribution or something like that :o)

    By the way, I guess you also have the possibility of including a 
machine in several classes, so if you want a machine to be a rsync and 
mail server, you just would include it in both classes and cfengine 
would do the rest...

    Best regards
    Jose