We will be holding some sessions at LinuxCon in San Diego this summer and will be very happy to see you there! We just got a 15% off coupon to give away, but you need to act fast - it is good for the first 10 attendees and then it expires. The code is LFSD12345 - use it when you register for LinuxCon 2012 here.
We are proud to announce the immediate availability of the CFEngine Design Center, a community-driven place to exchange CFEngine code, tools and information. The CFEngine Design Center opens the door to powerful knowledge-based IT infrastructure management without the need to immediately learn a new language. It enables system administrators to “stand in the shoulders of giants” by seamlessly reusing the knowledge and code of peers who have performed similar tasks before, and also to contribute their own knowledge back to the community. It makes it possible to set up a fully-operational CFEngine infrastructure without the need to touch a single line of CFEngine code.
Hello - my name is Diego Zamboni, and I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself. If you read the CFEngine forums, you have probably seen me around, but it’s nice to be able to step away from official business for a moment and just tell you about myself. I work for CFEngine AS since October of 2011, and my official title is “Senior Security Advisor”. In that capacity, I work on advocating CFEngine as part of the security toolset that any sysadmin should have, and also on providing internal guidance to make CFEngine even more powerful as a security tool. I have recently also started working on interacting with, promoting and nurturing the CFEngine user community. It is often me who posts in the @CFEngine_news twitter account, in the CFEngine Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and I’m often found on the #cfengine IRC channel as well. I very much enjoy interacting with people, writing, public speaking and teaching, so I am very happy in this role as well. I have been interested in computing and technology for as long as I can remember. My first computer was the venerable Timex-Sinclair 1000, which I got when I was 11 years old (and which came with an amazing 2kB of RAM!). Later I spent many, many hours playing with, tinkering with, and programming my Commodore 64, and later a C128. In fact, my first technical publication was in COMPUTE!’s Gazette, which published (in its September ‘91 issue) a program I wrote for cataloguing floppy disks. When I was in college studying computer engineering, I got a job as a sysadmin at the university’s supercomputer center. I was part of the team that managed both the Cray Y-MP4/464 supercomputer (how technology has evolved! That big, expensive supercomputer had 512MB of RAM, 1/16th of the laptop in which I’m typing these words) running UNICOS, and many other Unix systems running Ultrix, Irix, SunOS, NeXTSTEP, and other operating systems. It was during these days that I first started thinking about the issues surrounding the management of a heterogeneous mix of systems, and when I first read about and tried CFEngine, still back in version 1. It was also at this time that I got involved in computer security - there was a break-in into our Cray machine, and I participated in its investigation. I found the process fascinating. Afterwards I kept working in security, eventually founding the university’s first incident response team and computer security group, which continue to exist to this day, in a much more evolved form. Following my security path, I went to Purdue University, where I did my Ph.D. under the direction of Gene Spafford, one of the world’s top security experts. After graduating from Purdue in 2001, I went to work at the IBM Zurich Research Lab, where I worked for eight years doing research in intrusion detection and prevention, malware analysis and containment, and other fun things. In 2009 I returned to Mexico, and in the process switched to a vastly different job as a consultant for HP Enterprise Services. In 2010 I started writing, in my free time, a book about CFEngine. I had realized that CFEngine 3 was somewhat lacking in documentation (being relatively new, and very different from CFEngine 2), and I had been dreaming of writing a book for a long time, so the idea and the timing seemed right. Eventually I got my book proposal accepted by O’Reilly. As a result of this, I started a conversation with Mark Burgess, which eventually led to me getting a new job! I couldn’t be happier: I am working with a technology that I love, and surrounded by amazing and brilliant colleagues. As for my book, titled “Learning CFEngine 3”, I am happy to say that, as you read this, it should be available for sale from O’Reilly and other places. If you have been looking to learn about CFEngine, or want to reinforce your understanding of how it works, please check it out! I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So, there you have it, now you know a little more about me. I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment here, or contact me on twitter, where I am @zzamboni. I also keep a personal website and blog. See you around!
CFEngine is happy to see increased demand for our software, both the Open Source version, CFEngine Community, and the Enterprise Software version, CFEngine 3 Nova. We recently moved the CFEngine Community source code to GitHub and plan to use that platform to interact more closely with the general community (watch this space for hot topics to come!). We have also put up a test drive environment as a part of making CFEngine 3 Nova more accessible to potential customers. Qualified users* will be able to access and test a fully operational version of our Enterprise Software for free, without having to install and set it up on their own system. Specifically, users will be able to:
We are extremely happy to announce that the source code for CFEngine Community is now hosted on GitHub, one of the largest code-hosting services in the world. This move has many important advantages for both the CFEngine development team and for users. For one, it marks the switch from subversion to git as the source code management system, allowing for a much more agile development cycle and the use of more advanced tools. Being on GitHub allows users to more easily find the code and follow its development, makes it very simple to check out the source code, and to communicate with the development team. Check it out!
One feature our customers have requested for the next version of CFEngine Nova (available before summer 2012) is having the ability to collect reported data through a REST API. It is already possible to get at reporting data through the Mission Portal web-interface, as well as the command-line client cf-report. However, as we want to provide our customers with greater flexibility, we are now introducing the addition of REST (HTTP) as another interface.
At Tuesday night’s CFEngine Meet-the-Team BoF session at LISA, Joe Netzel, one of CFEngine’s talented Systems Engineers, showed off a small app that he has been building in his spare time to help new users become more comfortable developing their own CFEngine policies. In Joe’s own words: “The CFEngine Policy Wizard attempts to bridge the gap between established concepts that are second nature to System Administrators – such as setting file permissions, process management and software installation – by offering a side-by-side comparative view of the CFEngine syntax.”
***Editor’s Note: Packt Publishing has just come out with a new title, “The CFEngine 3 Beginner’s Guide”. In this guest blog, the book’s author, Rajneesh, gives an overview of the subject, his motivations, and its intended audience. * The publisher kindly offers blog readers access to a free e-chapter and a discount for purchasing the book. [The opinions expressed in this blog are the writer’s own. CFEngine AS does not endorse or validate its content.]
It has become common recently to refer to CFEngine on the web as an “academic” project. Turns out, though, that this phrase turns out to mean quite different things depending on who’s using it, and sometimes it doesn’t really mean anything at all. For CFEngine users, the academic connotation is generally perceived as a good one, representing CFEngine’s long standing commitment to both research and the educational environment. CFEngine is proudly academic in the sense that it was rationally and systematically designed and developed, with the specific choices based not on personal preferences or aesthetics but on well grounded, peer-reviewed and tested software engineering principles, things too often neglected in commercial software development.
The US Defense Department’s principal operational processing center for automated numerical meteorological and oceanographic analyses and predictions FNMOC chooses CFEngine Nova as the solution for their Meteorology and Oceanography Center, ensuring reliable weather reports for the US fleet. In September 2010, the Naval Inventory Control Point (NICP) purchased CFEngine Nova for The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center(FNMOC) in Monterey, California. CFEngine is the world technology leader in data center automation. Its software is used on millions of machines worldwide and is known to be versatile, lightweight and faster than lightning.
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