confighelper -- a rapid reconfiguration tool for grid nodes
The confighelper tool and its related scripts are in /usr/bootes/bin/rc on the 9gridchan.org image, and they are currently intended only for reconfiguration of the image from its default state. Some of the tools might work on a 'generic' plan 9 machine and setup, but results for several scripts might well be different than intended.
Confighelper is a simple menu based tool that currently supports operations such as resetting commonly altered plan9.ini variables such as system name and default boot choice and venti serverip, some fossil operations, some /lib/ndb editing and some combined operations for useful tasks such as creating a customized system image on an attached blank virtual hdd.
Everything is simple rc scripts, so one of the best ways to use confighelper is to learn some of the basics of plan9 administration by looking at what all the scripts do! I'd like to upgrade these tools to higher-quality general purpose plan9 tools. Right now they do not do sanity checking on user input and are in various ways special-case with regards to the setup of the 9gridchan.org image.
confighelper makes a backup copy of the files it works with to /tmp/configfiles and generally allows you the option to look at your changes and choose whether to save the modifications. Here is the main menu:
- (r) reset machine key, passwords, system name and authdom
- (a) add machine to grid - creates customized system on /dev/sdC1
- (f) fosilcons tasks - trigger snap, add user, check disk usage
- (1) change plan9.ini variables such as system name, kernel, venti server and boot defaults.
- (2) clone fossil from most recent fossil/last to blank disk attached as sdC1
- (3) update fossil configuration on /dev/sdC0/fossil
- (4) update /lib/ndb information such as IP and authdom.
- (5) create new system name and configuration in /cfg
- (6) create new venti server data partitions on /dev/sdC1
- (7) INFO ON transfer data between ventis
- (8) INFO ON customizing service listeners provided and system role
- (9) INFO ON auth configuration
- (q) quit confighelper
The current INFO options provide a few pointers on their subject matter but are mostly placeholders for parts of the toolset that haven't yet been written.