LinuxCzar

Engineering Software, Linux, and Observability. The website of Jack Neely.    

Bcf2: Controlling Groups

I think, in my environment, controlling what groups a machine is in relative to Bcfg2 will be one of the most challenging parts of deploying this configuration management system.  So many admins in so many departments all with legitimate need to configure servers and workstations.  Fortunately, Bcfg2’s Probes can help make this easier.

If you create a probe that outputs lines of text that look like

group: foobar

this will make the Bcfg2 client a member of the group “foobar.”  In fact, I’ve already discovered an interesting probe that will help in figuring out the basics for each machine.  Its called whatami.  It outputs useful groups like:

group: Linux
group: x86_64
group: rhel
group: 5

It uses parts of the LSB and other system information to figure out what Linux distribution, version, arch, etc. of the machine.

Perhaps, an easy way to help get machines in the right group is to have a local file on disk that has an initial set of groups that the local administrator can modify if needed.

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