Rudder

I think the $(sys.something) vars of cfengine are a little poor. I've managed to use the crontab technique to do this:

===============================================================================
Welcome to $(sys.fqhost)
This system is managed by your Rudder infrastructure
The policy was last updated on $(sys.last_policy_update)
The operating system flavour is $(sys.flavour)
The ip address of eth0 is $(sys.ipv4[eth0])
===============================================================================

Which will output this:

===============================================================================
Welcome to node.example.org
This system is managed by your Rudder infrastructure
The policy was last updated on Fri Oct 11 15:03:53 2013
The operating system flavour is ubuntu_12
The ip address of eth0 is 10.0.0.2
===============================================================================

My proposal would be to introduce special Rudder variables that make all inventory data directly available to techniques.

In that case my motd configuration could look something like this:

===============================================================================
Welcome to $(sys.fqhost)
This system is managed by Rudder v.$(rudder.version)
The policy was last updated on $(sys.last_policy_update)
The operating system flavour is $(rudder.inventory.os.name) $(rudder.inventory.os.version)
The network interfaces on this system are $(rudder.inventory.interfaces.str)
The ip addresses assigned are $(rudder.inventory.ip.addresses.str)" 
===============================================================================

Which will output something like this:

===============================================================================
Welcome to node.example.org
This system is managed by Rudder v.2.6.8
The policy was last updated on Fri Oct 11 15:03:53 2013
The operating system flavour is Ubuntu 12.04
The network interfaces on this system are eth0, eth1
The ip addresses assigned are 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3
===============================================================================

This is only an example of implementation and it might be a lot of work, but it would be very useful in my humble opininion. :)