On Aug 26, 2010, at 12:47 PM, Nigel Kersten wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Luke Kanies <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Aug 26, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Nigel Kersten wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Rein Henrichs <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Excerpts from Nigel Kersten's message of Thu Aug 26 11:27:25 -0700 2010:
>>>>> So I feel that it would be immensely useful for Facter to optionally
>>>>> store a certain amount of historical data about the fact evaluation.
>>>>> 
>>>>> It would be great to be able to simply interrogate info like "when did
>>>>> the amount of RAM in this machine change?" "what is my kernel version
>>>>> history?" etc etc.
>>>> 
>>>> Yes, this would be very useful. That said, it's not that we need Facter
>>>> to store historical data. We need *something* to store historical data.
>>>> Probably not Facter. Probably an inventory service. Probably something
>>>> that provides a rich query interface, like CouchDB.
>>> 
>>> But if we're considering adding a ttl/caching for facts, aren't we
>>> talking about Facter storing historical data anyway?
>> 
>> Adding a ttl isn't actually the same as doing the caching - that is, a given 
>> fact may want to define its own ttl for downstream users (i.e., Puppet) 
>> without actually doing any caching.
> 
> So in that case you may get a different value for a fact when running
> the Facter binary than when that same fact is used by Puppet? Doesn't
> that seem suboptimal?

It might be, but in that case you should set your ttl to zero.  If you're 
comfortable with a long ttl, then it shouldn't matter, right?

I guess the question is if there needs to clearly be a direct linkage in facter 
between that server-side view and the client-side view, and my perspective is, 
not really.

I've always thought of facter as a means of collecting data and as little else 
as possible.  In fact, the first use of Facter was sticking its output in an 
ldap db, and I wrote a separate tool (enhost) for that, rather than add 
additional functionality to Facter.

>>> Luke's next mail he says:
>>> 
>>> "Would it be acceptable if, say, the puppet agent provided a simple
>>> interface to the server-side fact storage, which will already have
>>> this?  We're working on designing something like this right now,
>>> although it's more mental goo than real ideas right now"
>>> 
>>> This would be ok, but how on earth does this work with load-balancing?
>>> You have no guarantee that you're hitting the same
>>> local-to-the-server fact store when interrogating.
>> 
>> The server-side storage would need to be centralized, which has to be done 
>> for other reasons anyway.
>> 
>> --
>> I think that's how Chicago got started.  A bunch of people in New York
>> said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't
>> cold enough. Let's go west.'         --Richard Jeni
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Luke Kanies  -|-   http://puppetlabs.com   -|-   +1(615)594-8199
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> nigel
> 
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-- 
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to
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Luke Kanies  -|-   http://puppetlabs.com   -|-   +1(615)594-8199




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