Re: cfengine darwin (MacOS X) patch

[Mark . Burgess]

On  4 Apr, John Valdes wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 12:02:41PM -0600, Michael J. Carter wrote:
> 
>> It seems that all the 'meat' in osx is buried in
>> NetInfo - which isn't very well documented. How are you planning to use
>> cfengine with OSX?
> 
> We're not sure yet.  At this stage, we were basically testing to see
> whether cfengine would compile & run with OSX w/o worrying about how
> we'd use it.  (The answer to this seems to be yes! :) ).  We mostly
> use cfengine for automating software & patch installation on our
> various Unix platforms (mainly solaris & linux at the moment); it
> remains to be seen whether we'll be doing this with OSX.
> 
> As far as NetInfo goes, there are command line utilities for
> manipulating the info therein.  See nidump(1), niload(1) & niutil(1)
> for starters.  For changing information that resides in netinfo, it
> may be possible to use editfiles: on text versions of the data, and
> then load it into NetInfo using niload with shellcommands:.  I'd image
> (NeXT|Open)Step users (or NIS, for that matter) have worked on this
> problem already?
> 
> It seems that the bulk of the information in NetInfo is accessed by
> the usual library routines (eg, getpwent(), gethostbyname(), etc)
> indirectly via a daemon called lookupd.  lookupd seems to be a
> typical nameservice type daemon and can be configured to lookup
> information from different sources (NetInfo, NIS, DNS, flat files,
> etc), so if you don't want to deal with NetInfo at all (probably a
> good thing :) ), in theory at least, it may be possible to configure
> lookupd to only consult flat files, in which case you can use cfengine
> to directly manage those files.  See the manpage for lookupd for
> details, or its source on www.opensource.apple.com (I think it's
> there; I can't seem to get through at the moment, due to local
> problems...) 
> 
> John



It would be great to see a short paper on porting / using cfengine
with Darwin at LISA2001. What are the differences, what are the
similarities? I am sure that that will be a significant issue in
choosing between win2000 and darwin in future. What about file
permissions etc...

http://www.usenix.org/events/lisas2001

Mark

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