CFEngine is very easy to install – just one package per operating system if you are using one of the pre-compiled packages we provide for the Community or for Enterprise editions.
We wanted to bring an equally effortless experience to the task of starting CFEngine; bootstrapping a client to a policy server.
Previously, this has been done by running
/var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent --bootstrap --policy-server <IP> which looks simple enough. However, the problem is that bootstrap and policy server are tightly connected - it does not make much sense to run them independently (bootstrap was actually just a shorthand for -f failsafe.cf).
Highlights The CFEngine Enterprise version 2.2.0 release is here, and this release is bringing major customer requests.
The Mission Portal graphical user-interface has gotten the following new features.
Dynamic host grouping Access control for reports REST API Dynamic host grouping The new edition of CFEngine Enterprise allows you to use any CFEngine classes to build arbitrary groups of hosts. Groups can be arbitrarily nested, yielding a tree-like structure. Below is an example of how a grouping by operating system classes may look.
When developing a large and flexible software system like CFEngine, it is an unfortunate truth that developers do not always get everything right at the first attempt. The source code is also changing frequently due to new features, optimizations and bug-fixes. As you can see from the Ohloh online statistics, thousands of lines are added and removed every week.
All changes have the risk of not working in every scenario, or breaking existing functionality. In addition, build errors may introduce unexpected behaviour that you want to detect before deploying to production.
Update [April 12, 2012]: Added information about the new templating engine.
Highlights The CFEngine Community 3.3.0 release is here, with the largest set of improvements since the introduction of version 3.0! We have added Virtualization and SQL promises to the open source edition and introduced service-promises for Unix. A new templating engine is in place. Some potential “gotcha” issues have been fixed, to streamline and simplify the use of CFEngine. The embedded database code has been significantly refactored, optimized and made much more robust. A large number of useful variables, classes and functions have been introduced. And as usual, a set of bugs have been fixed.
My CFEngine journey started in 2008, when I was still a student. I was working on my master’s degree in Mathematics, specialising in cryptography at the University of Tromsø. I had moved to Oslo to write my master’s thesis in cooperation with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. At the same time, I took a course in Business leadership at the University of Oslo. As part of this course, we got the opportunity to be interns at technology start-ups in Oslo.
The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization, is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional center for the field of the system administration for most of that time. LISA is a unique haven for practitioners in the field, but it was also the place where modern theory emerged, driven largely by the efforts of a small group of individuals known as the ABC of system administration: Anderson, Burgess, Couch. CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess has been attending LISA since 1997.
***Eystein Måløy Stenberg ****provides a sneak-peek into “Project Constellation”, new CFEngine Nova technology under development that will expand the universe of configuration management by integrating network, server and mobile management, as well as support both geographic diversity and massive scale.
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The Single Star
CFEngine 3 supports a wide variety of network architectures today, in environments with both reliable infrastructure and unreliable or mobile connectivity. The most common architecture is the “Star Network”, where you have one central hub responsible for sharing policies and collecting reports from all other hosts. This is the default network architecture adopted by CFEngine 3 Nova.
As the summer draws to a close, CFEngine’s core development team has been wrapping up some intense development to bring you version 3.2.0 of the CFE Community Edition. This release includes some major improvements to community users, and forms the foundation for our upcoming commercial release. See the blog post http://www.blogcompiler.com/2011/08/29/cfengine-3-2-0-extended-change-log/ for a technical summary.
We believe that CFEngine 3.2.0 is now the easiest and most scalable configuration management system to get running in multiplatform environments (Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX). Starting with the new bundled policy, just a single command on each host will bootstrap hosts together in a simple classical centrally managed star network, whether in the cloud or on bare metal.
CFEngine has been at the forefront of innovation in Configuration Management since the start of the 1990s, and CFEngine’s CTO and Founder Mark Burgess has been writing a lot about the history of those ideas as well as the vision of configuration management going forward. CFEngine is not a company that rests on its laurels. This year our CTO will be giving a number of talks about the Future of Open Source Configuration Management, this will be worth catching: first at the SCALE 9x conference in Los Angeles, and later at the UKUUG Spring Conference in the UK, as well as a number of guest appearances. We recommend:
Talk of the coming Cloud may be hanging on our horizon, but tonight, at Hr23.Day21.December::, planet Earth reaches the Winter Solstice, when its axial tilt reaches its farthest point from the Sun and darkest night of the year for us in Oslo. As part of our celebration of the holidays around the solstice, we would like to lay a small package under the tree for all our community users, to brighten the sky with a taste of our Nova templates for Linux Managed Services.
