This package is called the “Bombardier Client,” and its purpose is to provide some facilities for the Bombardier Server to make it easier for the server to do its job. If you’re a stickler for terminology, then, it’s not really a client at all, since is not used to connect to a server.
The way in which it does act like a client is that you’re going to install this software on all the machines that you want to enable for use in your Bombardier environment. Don’t worry, installing the client does not start any services on the target machines, nor does it create any users or do anything else nefarious. It simply installs some Python libraries that the root user will be able to take advantage of for the purpose of running commands via ssh.
A typical network that provides services to end-users has a series of isolated networks (DMZs) with servers on those networks. The Bombardier Server is the central point of configuration management and configuration control. It retains information about what software all the other servers in the network should have installed and how all those systems should be configured. To avoid confusion in terminology, all the servers that the Bombardier Server controls and manages are called “machines.” Software is delivered to and configured on machines by the Bombardier Server through the use of packages.
All communication from the server to the client is done via OpenSSH. No special protocols or weird client-server software needs to be installed or managed.
For a machine to participate in the Bombardier network, it must have three things happen:
- There must be a configuration file on the Bombardier Server for that machine, which contains at least the following information:
- The IP address of the machine
- The user that the server should connect to (via SSH)
- The platform of the remote machine (currently ‘linux’, which should work with most POSIX systems, including cygwin)
- It must be “enabled” on the server, which means that the server has exchanged SSH keys with the mahine.
- It must have this Bombardier Client installed on it.
The Bomabardier Server should be able to do all the installation work for you on all of the machines within the network. To see how to install the Bombardier Client using the server, read the Bombardier CLI documentation. You should only need to install the client yourself manually if Something Went Wrong.
If you are going to install the package manually, you need the following prerequisites:
- Python (this needs to be at version 2.4 or higher)
- SetupTools (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools)
Once you have setuptools installed under Python, you’ll simply need to type:
easy_install bombardier_client