Ansible and CFEngine are two configuration management tools and at first glance they look like competitors - two tools dealing with the same problem, in very different ways. But are they? Maybe they are actually not dealing with the same problem and are not as incompatible as it seems. Read our Ansible|CFEngine white paper providing an analysis of this area to learn more:
Introduction In the CFEngine Core team, we have recently been working on a fix for our WaitForCriticalSection() function. In short, the function checks a timestamp in a chunk of (lock) data stored in a local LMDB database and if the timestamp is too old, it writes a new chunk of (lock) data with the new timestamp. However, this used to be done in separate steps - read the data from the DB and close DB, check the data and potentially write the new data into the DB.
Problem to solve When working on the new Federated Reporting feature for CFEngine we had to solve the problem of collecting data from multiple CFEngine hubs (feeders) on a single hub (superhub). CFEngine hubs are using PostgreSQL to store data, so, more specifically, the problem was how to collect data from multiple PostgreSQL databases in one PostgreSQL database. And because we are talking about ~1 GiB of SQL data per feeder hub and for example 10 feeders connected to a superhub here, the initial and trivial solution using basically this ETL (Extract Transform Load) pipeline - pg_dump | gz | ssh | gunzip | psql - provided really poor performance.
Description The CFEngine engineering team has recently discovered a severe security issue in the CFEngine Enterprise product. CFEngine is using some internal secrets for authentication to the Mission Portal API and the PostgreSQL database when running background maintenance tasks. These internal secrets are randomly generated during the installation process and stored in files which only the root user has access to. Unfortunately, the commands that generate and store the secrets were being logged to the /var/log/CFEngineHub-Install.
Sign up for CFEngine Enterprise and connect up to 25 hosts for free. No credit card required. Get started in minutes.
Try enterprise for free
