Many-to-one copy

[Alexander Jolk]

Hi,

I'm copying my SSH host keys from all client machines to the server, in
order to generate a global known_hosts file on the server and
redistribute it to everybody.  This worked quite nicely so far, but now
I'm running into heavy scaling problems---there's almost always one
machine blocking the server, which means the server has many cfagent
processes running, and connections get refused.

Does anybody have an idea how to better organize things?  I had already
used `ifelapsed=1440' in order to try to contact every client machine
only once a day, but cfengine would establish the connection anyway.

What I'd like most would be to use something like SelectPartitionGroup
in order to copy keys from a few hosts, then copy from those Leaders to
a master host.  But there doesn't seem to be more than one layer to the
concept of partitions, and moreover there is no apparent way to get a
list of all partition leaders.  Any ideas on this?

I believe that if I had a function `ListPartitionLeaders', I should be
able at least to implement a two-tier solution.  (Each PartitionLeader
copies the relevant file from its list SelectPartitionGroup, and the
cfengine server copies the collection of files from the list of
partition leaders.)  Am I missing something?

Alex