Have you ever wanted some hosts to organize themselves into different groups, but without spending time to worry about assigning a specific group?
Cody, Craig, and Nick talk about using the select_class feature in CFEngine. Nick implements automatic assignment of a maintainer for each host:
- You want to assign a maintainer to each host that should be the primary point of contact.
- Some hosts should may have a specific maintainer, but generally, you don’t care about the relationship between the person and the actual function of the machine.
- It’s okay if the groups are not perfectly balanced.
First we provide a list of maintainers to select from.
bundle agent auto_maintainer
{
vars:
"maintainers" slist => { "Alvin", "Simon", "Theodore" };Next we generate classes for each maintainer in the form maintainer_Name.
"maintainer_options"
slist => maplist( "maintainer_$(this)", @(maintainers) );Then if a maintainer has been automatically selected we define a variable to hold the maintainers name, tagged for inventory so that it’s easy to visualize in Mission Portal.
maintainer_automatically_selected::
"maintainer"
string => "$(maintainers)",
if => "maintainer_$(maintainers)",
meta => { "inventory", "attribute_name=Maintainer" };Finally, we define the maintainer_automatically_selected class along with the selected maintainer class if a maintainer has not already been defined in the data:variables.maintainer variable.
classes:
"maintainer_automatically_selected"
select_class => { @(maintainer_options) },
if => not( isvariable( "data:variables.maintainer" ) );
}We saw that we got a pretty even distribution of maintainers without perseverating about each assignment.
Video
The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Post show chit-chat
- Is there an API or functionality to queue up new hosts for later trust acceptance?
- No, not currently, but please consider commenting on CFE-4362
- PSA: Check out the Hacker News post for CFEngine’s Star Trek and AI Origins (2023)
- You can log promise outcomes with
log_kept,log_repairedandlog_failedattributes inactionbodies.1, 2, 3 - You can automatically attach a default body to all promises not using that body with default bodies.4
- You can direct reports promises output to a file instead of standard out with the
report_to_fileattribute.5
Links
- Connect on LinkedIn w/ Cody, Craig, or Nick
- All Episodes
-
Documentation for
log_keptattribute inactionbodies: https://docs.cfengine.com/docs/3.21/reference-promise-types.html#log_kept ↩︎ -
Documentation for
log_repairedattribute inactionbodies: https://docs.cfengine.com/docs/3.21/reference-promise-types.html#log_repaired ↩︎ -
Documentation for
log_failedattribute inactionbodies: https://docs.cfengine.com/docs/3.21/reference-promise-types.html#log_failed ↩︎ -
Documentation for default bodies: https://docs.cfengine.com/docs/3.21/reference-language-concepts-bodies.html#default-bodies ↩︎
-
Documentation for
report_to_fileattribute forreportspromises: https://docs.cfengine.com/docs/3.21/reference-promise-types-reports.html#report_to_file ↩︎
