[nycbug-talk] jails: puppet vs. cfengine

[Francisco Reyes]

Charles Sprickman writes:

> question is on the host hosting the jails, can either of these tools 
> handle configuring the jail and see it as something of an "entity" that 
> can be moved amongst hosts.  

I am a puppet newbie myself.. but so far from the little I have looked into 
it I think it would be difficult to configure anything with puppet on the 
host hosting the jail. I think it may be possible to do something with the 
jail itself.

For example something along the lines of a jail defaulting to DHCP and then 
having puppet/cfengine getting whatever setup files the jail needs.

Although it may be possible my first impression is that it would not be 
easy.

> helpful if the two environments could be tied together - for example 
> changing the IP of the jail involves changes on the host (interface, 
> firewall) as well as the jail (any config files that reference that IP).

I can't see how it would be done with a program like puppet/cfengine. It is 
more than just "pushing" files and starting process. You are basically 
looking into what for all intent and purposes are different machines and 
coordinating actions based on information retrieved from the machines.
  
> assumption that either of them can do things like tie together interface 
> aliases and instances of that IP occurring in config files...

I think they may do that, but how does that tie back to the machine hosting 
the jails? I guess the part I don't believe would be easy to implement is 
the jail to host communication. I think an in-house/custome made program 
would be needed for that.

Have you tried asking in either of those programs mailing lists?