How does it work?

Once you have defined your unique names, how does cfengine know what to mount? The idea is now to define a list of servers for each class of hosts. See section binservers.

Suppose we make a binserver declaration:

binservers:

  mygroup.sun4::

     einstein
     newton

This would tell cfengine that it should mount all binary resources from hosts einstein or newton onto any host of type sun4 in the group mygroup. Every filesystem which is listed in mountables and is not a home directory will be mounted. See section mountables.

Home directories and binary resources are kept separate automatically by cfengine, because a home directory is one whose contents-name matches the homepattern pattern variable. See section Unique filesystem mountpoints.

A homeserver declaration:

homeservers:

  mygroup::
   
     einstein
     newton
     schwinger
     feynman
 

would correspondingly mean mount all the home directory resources on the hosts in the list on all hosts in the group mygroup. Clearly it is unnecessary to distinguish between the architecture platform types of the actual servers for user directories.

In each case, cfengine will mount filesystems, make the appropriate directories for the mount point and edit the filesystem table. See section actionsequence.

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