On 5 Apr 2009, at 4:00 pm, Jason Riedy wrote:
A similar situation exists in the node management space, where
existing solutions like CFengine were pretty much ignored by HPC
people.
Ha! Cfengine was pretty much ignored by *everyone*, including
its author for quite some time. Promising (pun intended) the
next great advance and not passing current maintenance to others
loses users quickly.
Count one cfengine user here.
Also, cfengine is (or was, when last I used it) designed to be a
pull-based system that polls a configuration server.
It still is. Our machines run it once a day.
The design
was more focused on asynchronous updates, and I think most HPC
folks would prefer a push model that updates everyone "at once."
I suppose we here don't mind the asynchronous nature, since we're
mostly running embarrassingly parallel single threaded jobs.
Cfengine had a push system, but to me it didn't feel like a good
fit with the rest.
It doesn't really have a push system. All it has is the ability to
trigger all the nodes to pull at once. Not something I use anyway.
I'm more shocked that no one has written up using cfengine for
managing laptops.
We use it for maintaining almost all of our Linux systems (2089
systems, according to last night's report I got from it). Not
laptops, but certainly Linux desktops.
I don't think cfengine is perfect, by any means, but it does what we
need for now. cfengine3 is going to be such a big change from
cfengine2 that I'm probably going to revisit the whole thing and see
if I want to change to something else.
Tim
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