On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am posting this to venture an opinion, and see if anyone has any ideas on > how best to handle this situation. > > I am working with the puppet developers to help improve Arch Linux support > in puppet (for those of you unfamiliar with puppet, it is an amazingly > crucial component in datacenter management - http://www.puppetlabs.com). > > Puppet can automate the starting and stopping of systems services as well as > managing if they are set to start on boot. In most Linux distributions > flagging a system service to start on boot is done with an application like > chkconfig and the order in which the system services start up is pre > determined by the distribution. > Arch Linux uses a much simpler approach to system services, the DAEMONS > array in the rc.conf. The problem faced with an automation system in this > scope is that the boot order of services is not predetermined. > > Right now the best idea we have been able to come up with is to have puppet > simply append the named services to the end of the DAEMONS array in the > rc.conf, but I wanted to ask the community if anyone had any alternative > ideas on how this could be done. > > The ticket containing the discussion on the matter can be found here: > https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/6697 i haven't had a chance to really sink time into it quite yet, but i have a moderately sized network i manage at w3rk and implementing puppet is high on my list of improvements -- am also considering using arch for hypervisor deployments due to the simplicity of spinning a custom environment. anyway ... could we just bypass rc.conf and add some additional logic to initscripts to load from a directory? example: /et/rc.daemons/@002-ntpd -> /etc/rc.d/ntpd /et/rc.daemons/@004-sshd -> /etc/rc.d/sshd initscripts could `echo /et/rc.daemons/*` if the DAEMONS variable is missing? does that simplify things or cause more issue? the other idea i had is a little more heavyweight, but we could use the augeas tool ( http://augeas.net/ ) to perform the rc.conf update directly; i'm fairly confident either that tool or something very similar is the future of all automated config editing, at least i hope it is, because `sed` is just a bad bad solution. i don't know puppets plans, but i wouldn't be surprised to see puppet depend on it, because it would be a good fit. C Anthony
