On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Jonathan Billings <billi...@negate.org> wrote: > On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 09:36:22PM -0700, Atom Powers wrote: >> I haven't tried puppet in over a year, but when I was evaluating it I >> could never get puppet to build a template from more than one piece. >> For example, if I wanted to add a line to crontab for each of several >> different classes. > > When it comes to editing files in-place, you'll get different answers > from people depending on what they use. > > I used editfiles in cfengine2, which I thought were quite powerful. > Some people think that editing files in-place is a horrible idea, > mostly because there are always corner cases where data are lost. > They'll say it's better to just push down whole files. I tend to > agree now, after being bit by the concequences of a poor edit. > > Some CF software lets you use templates (I know bcfg2 and puppet do) > which can get around the need to keep every variant of file on hand. > I use templates now, but I still wish I could use editfiles to modify > but otherwise keep the content of a config file. > > I'm impressed with Augeas (http://augeas.net/), which I believe Puppet > is now using. It provides an API to edit any configuration file, as > long as you have one of the Augeas specifications (or lens in > Augeas-speak) for that file. There are Ruby bindings so Puppet can > use the library natively. Unfortunately, it means that you have > yet another dependency and DSL to learn when creating novel lenses.
The issue with Puppet (as I understand it) is that you can't have multiple classes managing the same resource. So if something is handling /etc/crontab, something else can't. Editfiles is a whole other subject. However, many OSes provide an /etc/cron.d directory, and each file in there is a standalone resource that controls cron. IMO, this is where those sorts of things should be going, not editing the /etc/crontab file. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
