Table of Contents
It is recommended to run cdist with public key authentication. This requires a private/public key pair and the entry "PermitRootLogin without-password" in the sshd server. See sshd_config(5) and ssh-keygen(1).
When connecting to a new host, the initial delay with ssh connections is pretty big. You can work around this by "sharing of multiple sessions over a single network connection" (quote from ssh_config(5)). The following code is suitable for inclusion into your ~/.ssh/config:
Host * ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%l-%r@%h:%p ControlMaster auto ControlPersist 10
If you plan to distribute cdist among servers or use different environments, you can do so easily with the included version control git. For instance if you plan to use the typical three environments production, integration and development, you can realise this with git branches:
# Go to cdist checkout cd /path/to/cdist # Create branches git branch development git branch integration git branch production # Make use of a branch, for instance production git checkout production
Similar if you want to have cdist checked out at multiple machines, you can clone it multiple times:
machine-a % git clone git://your-git-server/cdist machine-b % git clone git://your-git-server/cdist