Daily Archives: July 25, 2006

First steps with cfengine

This afternoon I started looking at cfengine. In very little time, I’ve already set up rules that can bring a system from pretty much cdebootstrap state up to a minimal production system in our environment. I’ve still got a little ways to go, but it’s already hacking on /etc/hosts, hosts.deny, sources.list, installing appropriate Debian packages for our systems, etc.

It’s come a long way since I last looked at it six years ago.

One thing I can’t figure out…

I have a /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf file that contains, among other things, this:

Director {
  Name = backup-dir
  Password = "foo"
}

Director {
  Name = backup-mon
  Password = "bar"
  Monitor = yes
}

I can’t figure out how to make cfengine delete just that second section. I tried this:

       BeginGroupIfLineMatching "  name = .+-mon"
         IncrementPointer "-1"
         DeleteToLineMatching "\}"
         DeleteNLines "1"
       EndGroup

But it seems that the pointer is never actually being decremented, even when examined under verbose mode. That is, it leaves the leading “Director {” line in the file.

Something I can’t understand

I can’t understand Bush’s (and the typical Republican position in general) opinion on life issues. He recently said that it is wrong to “destroy life to save life” and that every being is a valuable person in the context of the stem cell debate. He also said last year that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the Iraq war.

So, here’s a Handy Chart:

Topic Bush Theory Bush Moral Judgement
Death penalty Kill known murderers so others won’t kill more people OK
Iraq war Kill 30,000 Iraqi civilians during operation to overthrow Iraqi government OK
Stem cell research A small minority could become babies if implanted Wrong
Abortion Killing an unborn person Wrong

I can’t figure out any possible way that the first two should be OK for someone that believes that the last two are wrong.

In fact, to me, the items in this list that most clearly are wrong are the first two. There is no question about whether life has begun with them. Treating 30,000 people as regrettable results of an operation is not treating them with full human dignity. 30,000 people were killed. That’s more than 10 times the number of deaths from Sept. 11.