CFEngine Policy Path

The CFEngine policy server is used to provide configuration scripts and various application config files to clients as needed. Clients always "pull" the files from the server; the server does not push the files. The client specifies the path on the server to find the file at (client specifies an actual filesystem path on the server, by convention below /var/cfengine/masterfiles).

In order to provide more flexibility in the management of clients, it is desired to be able to serve multiple versions of the configuration. One version is "prod" following the SVN trunk, one version is "rocks" which may at times be kept behind the trunk version, and another is "devel". In addition, a setup of files to work with the built-in CFE3 bootstrap mechanism is left in /var/cfengine/masterfiles.

To enable this, some code is added to the update.cf script that looks for a file /var/cfengine/policy_path.dat and roots all file requests starting with that path.

Path	Description
/var/cfengine/masterfiles	Default path and used for bootstrap
/var/cfengine/masterfiles-prod	Path for our normal hosts
/var/cfengine/masterfiles-devel	Path for testing new configs
/var/cfengine/masterfiles-rocks	Path for ROCKS WN (right now just a symlink to -prod on server side)

-- TomRockwell - 10 May 2012