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

[Czerak, Jason]

Personally, for very light work, I'd prefer not to have to install yet
another system to manage a tiny aspect.  I can understand if there are
things you almost need to compile (as an example of complexity) in order
to build a system out, but in my case, I just need a few "rm
/etc/rc3.d/S05*" kinda commands run, and "vmware-tools-config.pl
default". Simple stuff; things you can't run from kickstart all the
time. 

I did consider your RPM suggestion a while back. Maybe a simple self
destructing addition to /etc/rc3.d might work out as well, naturally
requiring a reboot.  That specific problem with VmwareTools that I've
found is its issue about operating in a remote shell.

I'd find it usfull to even have a light tool to manage
passwd/group/shadow files better.

-----Original Message-----
From: spacewalk-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:spacewalk-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of David Nutter
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 6:44 AM
To: spacewalk-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [Spacewalk-list] Feature request - Storage of Remote
Commands andhardware detection

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
Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI), a registered Scottish charity
No. SC006662

_______________________________________________
Spacewalk-list mailing list
Spacewalk-list at redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list