Re: Tiered admins with cfengine

[Mark Burgess]

On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 09:56 -0400, Jason Edgecombe wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I work at a university, and we are currently using cfengine in our 
> college to manage some linux and Mac machines. In our college, there are 
> two admins including myself who are trusted and have total control of 
> the cfengine config.
> 
> Using cfengine has been proposed as being adopted by the entire 
> University for Mac administration. My concern is how do we inherit the 
> campus config and only let people in our college modify the config that 
> affects our machines.
> 
> For example, I am in the College of Arts & Sciences and I can only 
> change the cfengine configs for machines in my college. The college of 
> Architecture would only have access to their machines, but we both 
> inheirt the changes pushed out by central IT.
> I simply want to limit the effects of accidental changes made by 
> different admins. It's not just newbieness that I'm worried about. I 
> don't have a full understanding of what my changes might do to another 
> college's computers.
> 
> Basically, how can we partition the cfengine set up between admins, but 
> still inherit a config from central it? Do we have to use different 
> cfengine servers for this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Jason

Hi Jason - you don't have to use different cfengine servers for this,
but you could, The way to inherit things is to use overridable
"includes". One way to organize the permissions is to use CVS or
subversion and put the different files in different projects so that one
needs permission to edit them.

Mark