[Demi-devel] Format for transferring machine information

[Andrew Pollock]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 10:24:02AM -0500, John Morrissey wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 07:12:57AM +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > My random musings:
> > 
> > 1) Have a cron job create a tarball, suck the tarball back.
> 
> Doing this with a cron job seems a little expensive, since I'd like Demi to
> update fairly often, to detect manual (i.e., not via Demi) changes to the
> machine. Machines will also need to be updated every time a command is
> completed (package install, etc.). Maybe call the job as-needed and then scp
> it off?
> 
> Or how about a wrapper around scp that will detect a request for the
> tarball, regenerate it, and then call scp(1) so the copy happens normally?
> Kind of a transparent update. The demi user's authorized_keys could have a
> command="/urs/sbin/demi-command-wrapper" stanza that could do this and also
> limit the demi user to authorized commands, as a security measure.

That sounds pretty novel, and like it'd work.
 
> > 3) Use the pipelining feature of the new version of OpenSSH
> 
> That feature seems really nifty. sarge shipped with OpenSSH < 4.0, but maybe
> we could use this as an optimization, if available.

Given that Demi is only going to ship with etch if we're lucky, it's not
going to be the end of the world if we rely on this feature, and stipulate
etch as our first functional release that we work with.

regards

Andrew