[arch-general] Arch Linux support in puppet

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 11:32 AM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me> wrote:
> 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.

... oooooor we use systemd which provides things like `systemctl enable foo` ...

i have deployed it to my private servers and my various
laptops/netbooks/etc with great success; quite frankly, it's pretty
awesome, and simple to manage ... should be hitting the main repos any
day now (if not already?) due to recent inclusion of util-linux-2.19.

not exactly OOTB though (yet ... bwa hahahahaha >:-)

C Anthony