on 15:20 Wed 02 Mar, Steven VanDevender (ste...@uoregon.edu) wrote: > Dr. Ed Morbius writes: > > While you're considering providers, another case we encounter fairly > > frequently are just general crap ISV or HW vendor-provided blob shell > > installers. Usually a self-unpacking shell script, which may itself > > include various internal packaging formats (tarballs, RPMs, etc.). > > Dell, VMWare, Oracle, and others. > > What we have done is to turn such blob installers into OS packages for > installation via Puppet, rather than try to manage the direct > installation of the blob installer via a convoluted set of execs and > such. Overall it is still much easier to manage OS package > installation, even with the overhead of having to create the custom > package. So as one example, we get the blob into the Mock RPM build > environment, unpack it, feed canned input to its configuration script, > and then wrap up the finished file tree as an RPM, then get that RPM > installed on the hosts that need it.
In the specific pathological case I'm thinking of (Dell's iSCSI management tools), the net end result is rather poorly defined and spans a significant chunk of the filesystem -- mostly under /opt/dell, but some stray (and largely undocumented) bits, mostly under /etc, with bits under /usr/src. I'd probably have to compare filesystem snapshots to identify these cleanly. > > I haven't put deep thought into a puppet solution, but the generalized > > method would be for the installer script / binary / ISO image, a > > configuration script (or arbitrary shell arguments and ancillary file > > list(s)), and some arbitrary post-installation test providing some level > > of assurance that what you wanted to have installed was actually > > installed. > > The thing is, RPM or DEB packages already do those things for you, so > why go to so much effort to duplicate that functionality outside your > package system? Because there's stuff that isn't packaged in RPM/DEB, and there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm not convinced this is a /good/ idea. It is, however, an idea. Figure folks can kick it around (or ignore it) and see what interest or other suggestions there are. -- Dr. Ed Morbius, Chief Scientist / | Robot Wrangler / Staff Psychologist | When you seek unlimited power Krell Power Systems Unlimited | Go to Krell! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
