[arch-general] Arch Linux support in puppet

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am posting this to venture an opinion, and see if anyone has any ideas on
> how best to handle this situation.
>
> I am working with the puppet developers to help improve Arch Linux support
> in puppet (for those of you unfamiliar with puppet, it is an amazingly
> crucial component in datacenter management - http://www.puppetlabs.com).
>
> Puppet can automate the starting and stopping of systems services as well as
> managing if they are set to start on boot. In most Linux distributions
> flagging a system service to start on boot is done with an application like
> chkconfig and the order in which the system services start up is pre
> determined by the distribution.
> Arch Linux uses a much simpler approach to system services, the DAEMONS
> array in the rc.conf. The problem faced with an automation system in this
> scope is that the boot order of services is not predetermined.
>
> Right now the best idea we have been able to come up with is to have puppet
> simply append the named services to the end of the DAEMONS array in the
> rc.conf, but I wanted to ask the community if anyone had any alternative
> ideas on how this could be done.
>
> The ticket containing the discussion on the matter can be found here:
> https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/6697

i haven't had a chance to really sink time into it quite yet, but i
have a moderately sized network i manage at w3rk and implementing
puppet is high on my list of improvements -- am also considering using
arch for hypervisor deployments due to the simplicity of spinning a
custom environment.

anyway ... could we just bypass rc.conf and add some additional logic
to initscripts to load from a directory?  example:

/et/rc.daemons/@002-ntpd -> /etc/rc.d/ntpd
/et/rc.daemons/@004-sshd -> /etc/rc.d/sshd

initscripts could `echo /et/rc.daemons/*` if the DAEMONS variable is
missing? does that simplify things or cause more issue?

the other idea i had is a little more heavyweight, but we could use
the augeas tool ( http://augeas.net/ ) to perform the rc.conf update
directly; i'm fairly confident either that tool or something very
similar is the future of all automated config editing, at least i hope
it is, because `sed` is just a bad bad solution.  i don't know puppets
plans, but i wouldn't be surprised to see puppet depend on it, because
it would be a good fit.

C Anthony