From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-11-17T07:38:13+09:00
Subject: Re: finding which OS?

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006, Luke Kanies wrote:

>> can you explain that?  custom .to_s?
>
> Facter is meant to be a collection of mechanisms for retrieving a named
> piece of data; e.g., 'uname -s' is the most common way of retrieving the
> operating system name, but it's useless on any Linux distro so instead I
> look for /etc/redhat-release or use lsbrelease.  Thus, it's pretty easy to
> think of Facter as a big hash, but instead of simple values it has one or
> more ways of retrieving each value.
>
> So, I just implemented to_hash as a way of returning all known facts and
> their values.
>
> I'm skipping any fact that matches /key/ here because Facter knows how to 
> retrieve SSH keys, which are huge and would have polluted the output.  I had 
> to pick between confusing people by skipping those values, or confusing 
> people by including them. :)

okay - it makes perfect sense then

>
>> seems like you should be able to do
>> 
>>   y Facter.table('key')  # or :key
>> 
>> for similar effect, or some such
>
> What would be the intent of that?

pls ignore - in light of above explanation...

> I originally wrote it a few years ago as an inventorying mechanism --
> there's a simple tool[1] that stores these facts into LDAP -- but now Puppet
> uses it heavily.  Every time a Puppet client connects to the server, it
> collects all of its known facts and passes them to the server as a hash.
> The server then sets these facts as variables in the top-level scope.  Thus,
> you can use $operatingsystem or $ipaddress in your Puppet configurations and
> use this data to make decisions in your configuratin.

well, i happen to be working on resource requests for ruby queue, eg

   rq queue submit --requirements="cpu > 3.0mhz and mem > 64gb" -- job.rb

so you can see what's applealing about it!

cheers.

-a
-- 
my religion is very simple.  my religion is kindness. -- the dalai lama