Failover redundancy in policyhosts

[Paul Paradise]

Hi all,

I'm looking at the feasibility of a cfengine distribution across about
1000 Solaris 6-8, HPUX 10.20-11i, and Linux machines. With a network
of this size we're specifically looking at some form of redundant
policyhost ability.

While it's easy to distribute the load by defining policyhost based on
classes and using a splay time, we're planning on distributing a lot
of files via the copy action from a remote server, but we'd like the
ability to do something like this:

control:

    policyhost = ( copy1 copy2 copy3 )
    actionsequence = ( copy )

copy:
    /files dest=/tmp m=644 server=$policyhost

I can emulate this by assigning copyhosts to one host based on some
class and varying the host, but I want the ability to fail over to
another host in the list if the client cannot connect to the server.

-- 

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Paul Paradise                                  paradise@qualcomm.com
 Interim Engineering Intern, QUALCOMM Incorporated       858.651.6655
 IT Host Services                                             AE-205C
----------------------------------------------------------------------