Some Cfengine Users
Intro to Automating System Administration with Cfengine 3
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Take some of the headaches out of managing sever farms with Cfengine 3. Use this automation introduction to save time, money and spare yourself crippling manual mistakes. |
Cfengine Nova Brings the Power of Unix Management to Windows
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Cfengine Nova for Windows is a true Windows port, offering integration with file system security, system registry,
event viewer and Windows management services. "Cfengine Nova for Windows helps me automate the management for software deployments in an
effective and consistent manner," said Omer Khalid, a senior fellow at CERN, who has been evaluating the new Cfengine product. |
Taming the beast
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Jason Allen talks about how to use a tool like Cfengine for configuration management. "..using a configuration managment
tool in conjunction with your node installation tools should allow you to get the system into a known good state in a
minimal amount of time... I've been using [Cfengine] successfully for many years." |
11 open source companies to watch
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Cfengine is acknowledged by Network World to be on of 11 open source companies to watch out for.
The magazine thinks Cfengine is one of the most exciting companies today due to its long track-record and its new server life-cycle solution (Cfengine Nova). |
Cfengine compared to the Big Four
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Cfengine challenges "the 'Big Four' management vendors -- BMC, CA, and IBM --
on not only cost but also capabilities. Cfengine [has] introduced [a]
project that will be worthwhile to follow and will likely give the big
four proprietary IT management solutions a run for their money...". |
Cfengine Nova introduces low-cost datacenter automation with integrated knowledge
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Cfengine, the leading Open Source provider of datacenter automation solutions introduces Cfengine Nova, drawing on 15 years of market feedback and more than a million installations of worldwide experience. Cfengine Nova is best of breed automation solution, bringing multiplatform repair and policy-based compliance to global organizations. Cfengine Nova has been enhanced extensively by user feedback to manage the entire server lifecycle. Read more here. |
Automate admin tasks with the powerful Cfengine framework
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Cfengine is a flexible framework for automating system administration
tasks. With Cfengine, you can manage one machine or a heterogeneous
network. The first version of Cfengine was released more than 15 years
ago by Mark Burgess, a professor at Oslo University. According to
usage estimates, Cfengine has managed more than 1 million computers
over the years. Version 3 of the Cfengine framework rolls out some
new capabilities and does away with all the old historical layers.
The developers have even retooled the language so that all elements are handled in a uniform way. |
Cfengine Launches Commercial Open Source Company
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Starting in 2009 popular, autonomic configuration management tool, Cfengine will be commercially supported
by a company formed by Cfengine author, Mark Burgess. Cfengine has a laundry list of brand names that are
using their software - AT&T, Bloomberg, IBM, Nokia, and many more. I suspect that many of them would pay for commercial support. |
Newly Released Cfengine 3 will Manage Resource Clouds
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Following 5 years of research and development, Cfengine AS has released an upgrade of the Open Source,
self-repairing software cfengine based on its Promise Theory technology. Cfengine is a self-repairing
maintenance engine capable of fixing errors and misalignments in the Data Center without human intervention.
Systems are compliant and maintained even when humans are unavailable, because they have made all the decisions in advance.
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Cfengine releases new version of self-repairing software
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Norway-based Cfengine AS has released Version 3 of its Cfengine open-source self-repairing data center
automation software based on its Promise Theory technology, following five years of research and
development under the technical direction of its long time author Mark Burgess, a professor of
network and system administration at the Oslo University College. |
Cfengine for Enterprise Configuration Management
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Cfengine is known by many system administrators to be an excellent tool to automate manual tasks on UNIX and Linux-based machines.
It also is the most comprehensive framework to execute admin istrative shell scripts across many servers running disparate
operating systems. Although Cfengine is certainly good for these purposes, it also is widely considered the best open-source
tool available for configuration management. Using Cfengine, sysadmins with a large installation of, say, 800 machines, can
have information about their environment quickly that otherwise would take months to gather, as well as the ability to change the environment in an instant. |
Automate Linux Configuration with Cfengine
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As your Linux/Unix network grows, you're probably going to get tired of running around to individual machines to do updates and fixes, unless
it's part of your fitness program. My ideal sysadmin scenario is rather like Dr. Evil's submarine lair: lounge about with a cat on my lap,
occasionally pushing a button. Only I have no grand ambitions to conquer the world; I just don't like doing my modest chores
the hard way. Cfengine (Configuration engine) is just the tool for streamlining hardworking system and network administrator's lives. |
Centralized Host Configuration With Cfengine
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One software package designed to handle select configuration conformity is Cfengine, by Mark Burgess of Oslo University. Cfengine is a
distributed convergent configuration management system with a centralized server and a client process on each machine. The purpose of
Cfengine is to allow the administrator to create a single centralized system configuration which defines how each host on the network
should be configured. An interpreter runs on each client host and parses the centralized configuration, checking the local machine's
configuration files against it. If the machine's configuration has diverged from the defined standard, the necessary changes are performed to
bring it back into conformity. |
Introducing Cfengine
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Cfengine, developed by Mark Burgess at Oslo University College, is one of the most powerful system administration tools available today.
In a useful deviation from most scripting tools, Cfengine allows you to describe the desired state of a system rather than what you should
do to a system. Cfengine itself takes care of testing compliance with that state and will do its best to correct any misconfigurations. |
Automating Security with GNU Cfengine
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Cfengine allows you to affect changes effortlessly across any number of dissimilar systems. Perhaps even more important, it provides automatic
documentation of exactly what you did. You even can use a few comments to explain why you did it. Each of your systems become a member of one
or more classes, and changes are made on a per-class basis. If a new system arrives, it automatically acquires the changes previously made to
other members of its class. |
Managing Servers with Cfengine
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Imagine this scenario: you have twenty servers under your care, some running Red Hat Linux, some running Solaris, and a few machines running Debian.
You want to make sure that all of the systems have the same network configuration, but you don't want to log in to each machine and make the changes by
hand. Unfortunately, you also know that it won't be easy to write a simple shell script to automate the task because each system's layout is a little bit
different. Making simple changes to all machines on your network, without automation, can be quite a hassle. Happily, that's what Cfengine is for. |
For more articles, visit the community site Cfwiki.org that holds a nice list of articles from 2003-2005.
