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App-Slaughter-3.0.4
River stage zero No dependents
4 ++
/ slaughter

NAME

slaughter - Perl Automation Tool

SYNOPSIS

  General Options:

   --delay         Delay for up to N seconds prior to launching.   Useful if you have a lot of clients.
   --dump          Dump details of the local environment, and immediately exit.
   --mail          Email the output of any LogMessages to the given address.
   --no-delete     Don't delete the compiled perl post-execution.
   --no-execute    Don't actually execute the downloaded policy.
   --role          Specify a role for this host, useful for policy writers.
   --transports    Dump the names of all available transports.
   --include       Include the specified file in our wrapper content.

  File/Policy Fetching:

   --prefix         The prefix for the transport we're using.
   --transport      The transport to use for policy/file-fetching
   --username       The username for the policy-fetch, if appropriate (http-only).
   --password       The password for the policy-fetch, if appropriate (http-only).
   --transport-args Any arguments to pass to the transport (used for rsync/hg/git/svn).

  Help Options:

   --help        Show the help information for this script.
   --manual      Read the manual for this script.
   --verbose     Show useful debugging information.
   --version     Show the version number of the slaughter client.

ABOUT

slaughter is a simple system administration and server automation tool, which is designed to download policy files from a central server and execute them locally.

The policy files which are downloaded are perl scripts which are executed with the help of a simple wrapper module - this module provides several new language functions (or primitives) which can be useful to manage systems.

TRANSPORTS

When this tool is invoked it will attempt to fetch a file called "policies/default.policy". This policy may include others, which are fetched in turn and inserted.

The policies, and any associated files, may be fetched via one of several mechanisms:

git
http
local
mercurial
rsync
subversion

The simplest mechanism is HTTP, which can be configured by specifying the prefix-URL of the server from which to download the files, and the transport of 'http'.

Given the configuration:

   --transport=http --prefix=http://server.example.org/slaughter/

The client will download the file:

   http://server.example.org/slaughter/policies/default.policy

The path "/policies/" is automatically appended to the first fetch, and to all subsequent policies. Similarly all files will be assumed to be beneath the common URL-prefix of:

   http://server.example.org/slaughter/files/

There are examples of other transports, including server-setup, in the included file TRANSPORTS.

PRIMITIVES

There are several primitives and variables available to your code which are made available by the various Slaughter modules.

These primitives and variables are described online:

  http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/primitives/

  http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/variables/

DEBUGGING

The simplest way to debug a potential problem is to execute slaughter with both the --no-delete and --verbose options. This will ensure that once the policy/policies are downloaded and compiled they will be kept.

The result should be that you'll be shown the name of a file - this file may be executed interactively to see what is going on.

You may also invoke slaughter with the --dump flag which will cause it to display the environmental details it has discovered, and which will be compiled into the policy prior to execution.

CONFIGURATION

The configuration of this tool may be carried out via the command line, however some options may be more naturally supplied in the system-wide configuration file.

For Unix platforms the global configuration file is located at /etc/slaughter/slaughter.conf, and it may be found at C:/slaughter.conf for Microsoft Windows systems.

A fully-featured file might look something like this:

  #
  #  Comments start with "#"
  #

  #
  #  Be quiet
  ##
  verbose = 0

  #
  #  Sleep for up to 60 seconds prior to working.
  #
  #  This is useful if you have many clients all hitting the same
  # central server at the same time (due to NTP and hourly cron
  # scheduling for example).
  #
  delay = 60

  #
  # Fetch the default policy from http://example.com/slaughter/policies/default.policy
  #
  # NOTE: "policies/default.policy" is automatically appended.
  ##
  transport = http
  prefix    = http://example.com/slaughter/

AUTHOR

 Steve
 --
 http://www.steve.org.uk/

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2010-2014 by Steve Kemp. All rights reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The LICENSE file contains the full text of the license.