Re: cfengine errors

[Chris Edillon]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Tracy R Reed wrote:

> There is no such file
> /var/cfengine/inputs/cfagent.conf on the client machines at the moment but
> there is an updates.conf. Would this cause the authentication to fail? I
> think the reason there is no cfagent.conf at the moment because we just
> don't have any rules to deploy for these machines yet.
> 
  unfortunately i haven't had the time to work with cfengine 2.x
much yet, so i'm not up on the authentication mechanism.  however,
i think the biggest problem you're having is exactly what you
mention above: cfagent.conf is missing.  in order for cfagent to
run at all, it needs the main config file cfagent.conf to exist
where it expects to find it.  since it doesn't, it will exit with
the error you saw.  if you're not deploying rules on those machines
yet, you shouldn't be running cfagent there.  i would think that if
cfagent is exiting immediately in this way it wouldn't get to the
point that it's trying to set up authentication, so i'm not sure
why you're seeing those messages for the same machines which are
missing cfagents.conf.
  that said, your last statement makes it sound like you're writing
custom cfagent.conf files for each of your machines.  if this is
the case, you should rethink your cfengine architecture.  the whole
point of the classing system in cfengine is so that you can define
all of your rules for all of your various machines in one file, but
the rules will only run on a machine if all of the classes for that
rule are valid on said machine.  so if you have something like:

  processes:
      elmer::  "the_wabbit"  signal=kill

only the machine named elmer will kill processes matching the string
"the_wabbit", (assuming that the "class" elmer is a hostname class)
even if this rule is in cfagent.conf on all of your machines.
  if you're not writing custom config files for each machine, just
ignore what i said back there.  :)