saltstack/salt — Issue #355: Support puppet style external node classification
Author: SEJeff
Created: 2011-12-13 17:02:11+00:00
State: open

In puppet-land, people want to delegate the role of what nodes have what classes to other tools such as [cobbler](http://cobbler.github.com/). The general name of this feature is the [External Node Classifier](http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/external_nodes.html). The idea is that an external tool spits out some specially formatted yaml with classes and extra metadata for puppet.

We should support this natively in addition to and/or in place of top.sls. Here is example output for a fake oracle server record using the cobbler's builtin "cobbler-ext-nodes" ENC:
```classes: ['oracle::server', 'global::files']
parameters: {from_cobbler: 1, tree: 'http://@@http_server@@/cblr/links/RHEL-5.2-x86_64'}```