Re: cfengine Mac packages, universal binaries, and mass deployment

[Chris Kacoroski]

Jason,

I have pushed cfengine out to 1500 macs.  The only way was to touch each 
one by hand as the Mac has no package management (this was talked about 
in the Apple Guru talk at LISA'05 -- Apple is working on a package 
management system for the future).  Since we had timbuktu on most 
machines, we hired a person who just installed a cfengine installer that 
we created.  The installer was a self extracting archive that:

- setup the cfengine keys with the server
- installed the basic cfengine  binaries
- ran cfengine 3 times to complete the machine configuration.

cheers,

ski

Jason Edgecombe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been running cfengine on about 50 Mac's running OS 10.3 (Panther) 
> for at least 6 months now. We also have lots of mixed distro linux boxen.
>
> Various forces have aligned as to push the cfengine Mac deployment to 
> the top of my todo list. BTW, I work at a university. I would guestimate 
> that we have 200-400 Mac's to deploy to.
>
> I'd like to hear the experience of others who have done mass-deployment 
> of cfengine on Mac's before.
>
> These are unmanaged Mac's. Most were installed from an image, but no 
> management hooks are in place now. apple Remote Desktop/remote login is 
> not an option because it isn't enabled on most.
>
> The Plan:
> The plan is for myself and an handful of co-workers and student workers 
> to touch each machine and install cfengine. Installing by hand on the 
> command-line isn't really an option because of the skill-levels 
> involved. I plan to create a Mac-installable pkg file that can be 
> double-clicked and will perform the install.
>
> I'm looking for any advice that anyone may have, from creating the 
> package to deployment. We have a working set of cfengine inputs, so that 
> isn't a big problem. I also have a working cfengine rev .14 binary. I 
> figure that is well tested and I can upgrade later.
>
> I don't currently have any Intel Mac's, but has anyone played with 
> cfengine on any of the new Intel Mac's? Has anyone create cfengine as a 
> universal binary? Any advice on these things would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason Edgecombe
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Help-cfengine mailing list
> Help-cfengine@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine

--
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
  connected to the entire universe"                John Muir

Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, ckacoroski@nsd.org, 425-489-6263