Re: Tiered admins with cfengine

[Alexander Mattausch]

Hello Jason,

Jason Edgecombe schrieb:
> 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?

What about using imports for this?

import:
 any::
   global.conf
 college1::
   college1.conf
 college2::
   college2.conf

The files that are imported have set their ownerships appropriately, so 
that e.g. only the admins of college1 are allowed to edit college1.conf. 
This example can be improved with unique directories for each 
"administrational unit". Of course the groups have to be defined, this 
depends on your network infrastructure and can be done e.g. by IP ranges.

Hope this helps
Alex