Forum: CFEngine Help Subject: Re: cf_promises_validated : bug 1258 Author: davidlee Link to topic: https://cfengine.com/forum/read.php?3,27307,27591#msg-27591
Thanks for the reply, Nick. Much appreciated. By far the major problem seems to be a complete lack of any formal documentation. Your reply above is helpful, as is Eynstein's blog entry. But we could really, really benefit from some sort of brief but officially provided description of how this is supposed to work (including "am_policy_hub"; see later). So, please, if any of the developers is reading this, could we have some documentation about this? Please? That said, I may be getting there. Firstly can I check that I understand your description of "cf_promises_validated" above? Assume "failsafe.cf" is as distributed at, say, 3.3.4 (community edition). (1) Within any machine, is the copy in "inputs" (i.e. "inputs/cf_promises_validated") used at all? I suspect not. (2) On the central hub, is the copy in "masterfiles" (i.e. "masterfiles/cf_promises_validated") magically maintained within cfengine itself (some black magic deep within the source code, rather than a user-visible ".cf" file)? Minor supplementary question: how might this extend to slave hubs? (3) On any non-hub (simple client) machine, is the copy that ends up in "masterfiles" (i.e. "masterfiles/cf_promises_validated") ultimately copied in from a hub? I think I see what might be happening in my case. I suspect it might be related to a mysterious, and similarly almost completely undocumented, thing called "am_policy_hub". This "am_policy_hub" seems to be some sort of pre-defined class, used by "failsafe.cf". Envisage a simple cluster of two machines, one where policy is maintained, the other a pure client. I presume the former should be routinely running with "am_policy_hub" set and the latter with it unset. But how is this set/unset nature actually defined? I suspect that my policy hub is, for some reason, is running with "am_policy_hub" unset instead of set. (I have just done a quick check by putting a temporary "reports:" section into one of our ".cf" files to tell me; both a client and a (supposed-to-be) hub reports they are not hubs.) What is the cleanest way to fix this (presumably so that "am_policy_hub" is appropriately set/unset on hub/client)? By the way, there are at least two improvements that could be made to the contents of "cf_promises_validated". Indeed, one of them may even classify as a bugfix. (1) The contents (a single line datestamp) lack a trailing newline. This is an irritating (but admittedly minor) annoyance when "cat"ing the file to look at it. (2) It lacks a timezone. Won't this be troublesome (i.e. buggy): (i) when Daylight Savings changes occur; (ii) for sites/organisations that span multiple timezones (policy hub in one TZ; clients in another)? _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@cfengine.org https://cfengine.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
