The latest updates about everything CFEngine

The Guru is in Session at LISA 2012

Do you want to learn more about CFEngine, and hear about the latest developments, tools, tricks and tips? Please join us for “The Guru is in: CFEngine” at LISA'12, a session where you will hear directly from CFEngine developers, engineers and power users. Some of the topics that we will discuss include the latest features in recent CFEngine releases, the CFEngine Design Center, and using Vagrant with CFEngine. Bring your own questions and topic suggestions too! Whether you are currently using CFEngine or just want to learn more about it, whether you are a newbie or an expert, we are positive you will find this session informative and interesting.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
November 14, 2012

QNAP and Raspberry Pi Support

Earlier this year we made several proof of concepts to demonstrate that CFEngine can run on embedded and mobile devices. We compiled CFEngine for a devkit 8500 board, Android, QNAP and Raspberry Pi. Due to popular demand we have made the QNAP and Raspberry Pi packages publicly available, free to use for up to 25 nodes. This is an alpha version of Enterprise 2.2 compiled for these platforms, please be aware that we do not provide support for these packages. Official versions may be provided at a later point. Download them at https://cfengine.com/download

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
November 9, 2012

CFEngine, virtualization and VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi)

In todays environment where words such as virtualization, cloud and agility constantly buzz in our ears, enterprises look for ways to manage their increasingly dynamic infrastructure. The Cloud::Services sketch from the CFEngine Design Center implements a policy to manage virtual machines (VMs) on VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi). With this sketch, CFEngine can clone, start/stop, delete and configure VMs seamlessly alongside your physical infrastructure.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
August 29, 2012

Using Splunk to analyze CFEngine logs

0. Why? CFEngine Enterprise collects very detailed, real-time information about the configuration of your IT Infrastructure. Splunk is an excellent enterprise search engine, engineered for speed, robustness, and scalability. You will learn how analyzing CFEngine logs with Splunk lets you see CFEngine data in new ways. You will learn how to access CFEngine’s logs, what information they capture and how Splunk’s “rex” command and other neat tools make that information accessible.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
July 18, 2012

LinuxCon 2012 Presentation by Mark Burgess

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.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
June 29, 2012

LinuxCon 2012 Presentation by Diego

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.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
June 22, 2012

Model-based monitoring with CFEngine

“A model is a lie that helps you to see the truth.” (Howard Skipper) “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” (Kurt Lewin) The past year has seen a plethora, one might even say an entire movement, of talks and blog posts under the heading “Monitoring Sucks”. Plenty of valid criticisms have been made about the state of the art in monitoring. Back in 1998, I was similarly dissatisfied with the state of the art, and began to ask some basic questions that resulted in CFEngine’s present day tools for system monitoring. This article is a reminder of CFEngine’s smart, and extremely lightweight tools for de-centralized monitoring. These tools were designed to be adaptable, hands-free and to scale to tens of thousands of hosts, while handling machine-learning pattern matching, and responding automatically to thresholds and anomalies with minimal latency, with or without human intervention.

Posted by Mark Burgess
June 10, 2012

The CFEngine Design Center: component-based IT infrastructure engineering

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.

Posted by Mahesh Kumar
June 6, 2012

CFEngine 3 Enterprise 2.2.0 release notes

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.

June 4, 2012

CFEngine 3 Enterprise is leaving dry-dock ...

Today, the CFEngine team is announcing CFEngine 3 Enterprise. With the major part of the CFEngine 3 technology being in an open source core, our exploratory commercial edition, was originally dubbed `CFEngine Nova’ – the `New star in configuration management’. Today, CFEngine 3 is no longer a newcomer, but a proven solution in datacentres around the world. With today’s launch, CFEngine 3 Enterprise leaves orbit and begins its voyage to manage an ever expanding universe of IT.

Posted by Mark Burgess
May 29, 2012