About Vertical Sysadmin

Vertical Sysadmin Inc specializes in automating system administration using policy-based system administration tools like CFEngine. Aleksey Tsalolikhin, head of Vertical Sysadmin, has been administering UNIX systems for over 14 years, and using CFEgine for five. At EarthLink, which grew to over 5,000,000 users, he wrangled hundreds of servers by hand, developing an abiding interest in automating configuration management. Aleksey is a member of LOPSA, USENIX, ACM and IEEE Computer Society, and a full-time system administrator.  Aleksey writes and teaches about distributed system configuration management tools in general, and CFEngine in particular.  Aleksey was trained by Mark Burgess, the creator of CFEngine.

CFEngine Training Courses, presented by Vertical Sysadmin:

Automating System Administration using CFEngine 3

Who should attend this course:
Anyone with at least a basic knowledge of system administration interested in increasing operational efficiency and sysadmin happiness.

Why do you need to know about Automated System Administration?
Automation of system administration is the key to scalability. It helps not only in change management but also in knowledge management (documenting the intended state of your system and the reasons why it is configured that way). Automating your system administration is key to career progression from system administration to more interesting system engineering work.

Why CFEngine 3?
CFEngine is the granddaddy of policy-based configuration management systems, and CFEngine version 3 increases the power and flexibility of managing network-attached computers. CFEngine can operate in the widest variety of environments, from embedded sensors to supercomputers, from underwater to outer space. It can run on the widest range of operating systems and has the smallest resource footprint. CFEngine is a very powerful tool.

What you will take back to work:
A thorough grounding in automating system administration using CFEngine 3 and the ability to implement configuration policies on your systems.  You will be able to automatedly handle and control files, processes, packages, and commands, all resulting in Correct and Known Configuration on your servers.  You will know how to set up CFEngine client-server, so that you can use it at scale.

What this course covers:

1. The history, design principles, and philosophy of CFEngine:

• CFEngine 1: A configuration management language to handle different Unix systems
• CFEngine 2: Computer Immunology and Convergence to Desired State
• CFEngine 3: The Promise Model
• The importance of abstraction for knowledge management

2. The Basic Grammar of CFEngine 3:

• Promises of desired system state
• Promise atributes
• Collections of promises
• Collections of promise attributes

3. The CFEngine 3 Data Types and How to Use Them:

• Scalar variables: Strings, integers, and real numbers
• Lists of Scalars

4. How to use Patterns in Promises to Describe Configuration Efficiently:

• Classifying servers to control when and where configuration promises apply using CFEngine "classes"
• Leveraging the power of regular expressions
• Using lists to drive action: add or remove users, install or delete packages, and so on.
• Re-using code by abstracting promise attributes into parameterizable promise bodies
• Re-using code by abstracting promise bundles into parameterizable methods

5. Advanced CFEngine Topics

• Selecting files using simple and compound filters
• Selecting processes using simple and compound filters
• Configuring a CFEngine client-server system
• Generating reports; how CFEngine can help you audit and report compliance.

6. Many practical examples and exercises to help seed your policy set.
The course balances theory and practical.  See the complete course plan.

Requirements: Attendees are expected to be familiar with command-line Linux/UNIX utilities and basic system administration tasks (installation software, setting up networking, etc). Each attendee will be asked to bring a laptop with VMWare Player as this class includes exercises that will be performed using a provided VM.

Learn More

Click here to contact us for more information on Vertical Sysadmin’s CFEngine training courses.