A good location for flag files & on-demand per-user apps

[Jason Edgecombe]

Hello again,

Is there a good location in the cfengine directory tree or somewhere 
else to put flag files? I looking to set up two sets of flags, permanent 
and semi-permanent. Permanent flags would be ones that specify which 
department a machine is in. Semi-permanent flags would be tidy'ed after 
some time.

The background of this is that our college-level work with cfengine has 
caught the attention of campus IT as a possibly solution to manage our 
Mac's which currently aren't managed. The campus uses Novell Zenworks 
for windows management. One feature of Zenworks is that when a user logs 
in, applications that are associated with that user are immediately 
pushed out. We have a few roaming users who can benefit from this and 
Campus IT would be more amenable if I can prove that this is possible.

I would prefer that all application be local and installed everywhere, 
but some licenses forbid this and we just have too many applications and 
we don't have a network storage share in place for all of the Mac's.

I was thinking that in the system login script, we check the username 
against a list of usernames and associated applications. If a user is 
associated with an application, then the correct semi-permanent flag 
file would be touched. Cfengine would then install the application based 
on the existence of the flag file and tidy the semi-permanent flag 
files. We could even remove the application if the flag files doesn't 
exist. This would handle our roaming users. The only catches I see are 
as follows:
1. how to inform/lock out the user while the application is being pushed 
out.
2. how to do it immediately upon login.

Thanks,
Jason