Thanks for the detailed reply! On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 07:18:13AM -0700, jcbollinger wrote: > > It sounds like your problem is that you don't in fact want to > collect *resources* at all -- rather, you want to collect *data*. > That is not what exported resources are for.
That's entirely correct. I knew I was hacking around a "not really designed to do this", I just thought it might be possible anyway. > Exported resources are resources intended to be managed on nodes > other than (or in addition to) the one declaring them. There is > necessarily an aspect of data sharing to that, but they should not > be viewed as a vehicle for data sharing. OK. > > It sounds from what people are saying like there really isn't a > > reasonable way to do this yet? > > Again, it depends on what "this" is, but I think you are > approaching the problem backwards. If you need centralized data > then you should create a data source and use it to drive your > resource declarations wherever appropriate. Details depend a lot > on your general approach and the complexity of the data, but if > you want to access your shared data store from within Puppet > itself then I'd recommend looking into hiera. The data right now is *incredibly* simple; just a list of email addresses (one for each user defined on each host everywhere). Adding a whole data source system just for that seems like significant overkill. Using the @@file trick, while cheating as you say, seems a lot less effort until/unless Puppet integrates some method of data sharing. Note that by "integrates" there I don't mean "comes with" or anything, more like "I can run a couple of yum installs and tweak a couple of config variables and it works", which I'm pretty sure isn't the case now for any such shared data stores. To be more specific, I have user definitions in my site.pp for various users that have accounts on various hosts. The user defines currently look like this: users::normal { bob: id => 111, email => 'b...@bob.com' } and that is used to set up various things about that user on the host that it's defined on (i.e. the actual account). I would, in addition, like to collect all the email addresses in one place on a particular host. I'm actually not sure that Hiera would solve the problem anyway; if I have a list of user information stored in a Hiera .yaml file, it's not at all obvious to me how to access the email addresses in such away as to make them available all at once in a template somewhere. I suppose if I could walk the Hiera tree in a template that would work; is that possible? -Robin -- http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future. Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false" is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/ -- 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.