[BBLISA] Odd question about cfengine. Can this be done?

[Alva L. Couch]

Josh Smift wrote:
> MT> We all know the shortcomings of the idea and agree with it being a
> MT> "not best practice" :)
> 
> Well, I don't. :^) Seriously, I'm surprised that you apparently got so
> much negative reaction. If you want to manage most of the files on the
> system with one instance of Cfengine, and you want to let some DBAs manage
> some Oracle-related files with another instance, and I want to manage my
> home directory with another instance, I don't see any obvious reason why
> we couldn't do that. What am I missing?

It is rather easy and straightforward to have several instances of 
Cfengine manage different things, but there is no mechanism whereby
the different instances can learn about each others' existence.
In the case where two instances manage the same resource, they will 
"fight" about its content. Cfengine will not have any problem with
"fighting" -- it is designed for this possibility -- but fighting
will lead to instability that will show up in the change logs.

Conversely, if one merges the two configurations into one file,
Cfengine can detect *some* of the conflicts automatically, and resolve
them without instability.

It seems like for your stated use, two instances are better than one.
In fact, I often recommend that people use multiple instances rather
than trying to merge them, *especially* if two admins' domains of
responsibility are different.

-- 
Dr. Alva L. Couch
Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155
http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~couch