[Spacewalk-list] Feature request - Storage of Remote Commands and hardware detection

[David Nutter]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 05:03:49PM -0500, Czerak, Jason wrote:
> I'd like to spark the discussion about storing remote commands with in
> Spacewalk along side Configuration files as well as some sort of
> hardware detection.
> 
> I'd imagine remote commands would be a subset of configuration files
> since they could and should be a dependency. 
>  
> For example, if my servers are VMware servers. I would need to not only
> install VMwareTools rpm, I need to execute VMware-config-tools.pl. After
> a kernel upgrade, the VMware-configu-tools.pl would need to be executed
> again. As a work around, I plan on storing templated remote commands on
> Sharepoint.

I think this sort of thing is best dealt with by a fully-fledged
config management system (e.g. LCFG, puppet, bcfg2 etc) rather than by
making spacewalk a repository of scripts. The major advantage of such
systems is that the system is automatically kept in compliance with
the profile rather than requiring admin intervention to run the
relevant commands, remotely or otherwise.

That said, my current approach to this problem is a ghastly hack: I
distribute such "reusable" remote commands as scripts in a
package. Once the package is installed on all systems then
(re)invoking the command is a simple one-liner remote command. For
things like VMware, I have an init script that invokes the necessary
config script when the server is rebooted, using the run-parts
utility.

In the future I plan to replace this flaky approach with LCFG, but any
config management system would work just fine and provide many more
features than simply storing the remote commands in Spacewalk.

Regards,

-- 
David Nutter  				Tel: +44 (0)131 650 4888
BioSS, JCMB, King's Buildings, Mayfield Rd, EH9 3JZ. Scotland, UK 

Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) is formally part of The
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