Re: debconf and cluster management
>> Matthew Palmer <mjp16@ieee.uow.edu.au> writes:
> > Did anybody there already tried it ? is it as cool as it seems ?
>
> Thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't noticed it (this is the sort
> of thing DWN should be mentioning!) but it does seem to be uber-cool.
Debconf was designed[*] from the beginning to support this. AFAIK, at
the moment there's no "remote" back-end yet. What you'd need is a
server that can spit out debconf information and the matching client.
One possibility is to use a SQL back-end. Joey Hess started to write
such a thing, AFAIR, but I don't know how far that is.
> All that would be needed extra is a way to get all possible questions
> from a list of packages and answer them without doing anything to the
> running system. I guess fiddling with debconf.conf and apt-get would
> probably solve it, or something in apt-utils...
That'd be the non-interactive front-end.
The basic idea is that you configure a machine using the interactive
front-end, store the configuration on a remote location and then
configure the rest of the machines using the non-interactive front-end.
Then you get spammed with tons of mails telling you how hundreds of
machines where configured the same way :-)
[*] Ok, ok, that configuration management thing, but the one practical
implementation of that is debconf. For the specification, take a
look at /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/debconf_specification.txt.gz
--
Marcelo | "Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said
mmagallo@debian.org | 'miaow'."
| -- Our hero meets Gaspode the wonder dog
| (Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
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