Re: what to do w/ hosts

Daniel H writes:

>     Ark seems to have a bunch of code in it oriented at
> doing "push" style infrastructure admining.  A lot of the
> problems you seem to be having seem to stem from this
> world view.  ...

Hi, thanks for a useful interjection :-)

You're right, there is a lot of such code, but I would like
to think that simply reflects how we happened to want to do
some stuff.  You could do ARK entirely without it.  At the
ARK engine level (more basic), I would hope that (on host
'foo') that

   ark package do-it --hosts=bar wibble

is 'push' (assuming 'wibble' is a non-proxied method) and
that

   ark package do-it --hosts=. wibble

is effectively 'pull'.  That is, at the "engine level", you
can be either push or pull; we don't legislate (and my
instinct is *not* to).

On the practical Sidai packages side, my goal has been to
have all methods up to 'install' (grab the source, compile,
... 'make install') be "push"-style methods [because you do
them on a once-only ad-hoc basis], and the deploy (get it on
a host) and reveal (show to users) methods would be
"pull"-style, probably re-run out of a cron job every
night.  Something like that.

Alternatively (and mimicking what Tobias Oetiker did [see
his LISA 2001 paper]): instead of *doing* the deploy/reveal
steps, generate the cfengine config to do it.  Then let
cfengine watch over things.  [This mini-project is on the
back-burner for lack of time currently.]

Following on from...

> The problem of "where does this code run" is completely
> different under pull style infrastructure.  ...

I wonder what an ARK world would look like if we made
"push"-style operation simply impossible/inexpressible?  How
would we do something like Jonathan's routers, or a
not-a-proper-computer NetApp filer?

   ark router tip-me-over-gently ALL

(This is kinda the opposite of "pull"-only -- it's "I don't
want to ever run ARK stuff directly on this box, ever".)

My suspicion in all of this is that there's a nice
conceptual breakthrough, maybe not huge, just lurking *right
there* in the bushes... and if we can just see it...

Many thanks to all who are chipping in!

Will