Use Case: Install System Level Utility
This use case covers needing to install a utility or other binary at the operating system level, including those requiring sudo access.
For example, we often use wget to pull down files and sometimes it's just not there.
For many projects, we need the latest version of various version control packages since various dependencies may be using different (D)VCS systems. Even if the system is shipped with the particular distribution, the packages are often several revs behind the latest from the developers and we like to keep them up to date.
Also, one of the things we often need to do is 'top off' the security patches on an instance since we may have instances running past the time that security patches are released or our source images may not have the latest patches.
The Challenge
We sometimes set up single-purpose, passphrase-less SSH keys for users. This lets us login to servers via SSH quickly.
Unfortunately, this is documented to prevent use of sudo.
TBD: ss -- Sunday, May 3, 2009
It is unclear to me what the rules are here and what we're going to do about them.
There are several notes in the 'programmers_guide.txt' file about requiring a single username/password for all logins on all hosts and also some notes about possibly using a registry in place of ENV['fab_hosts'] and/or CONNECTIONS.
There was also some discussion of setting up multiple hosts, and storing some additional host specific information with each host (e.g. amazon ec2 credentials).
I (ss) am not sure where to go with this but it's fairly obvious that this issue requires further discussion. I'm leaving it for now, and will get back after I've worked over a couple of my actual use cases and written some code to see what is workable in my situation.
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