Hi everyone,
Recently we have been thinking about how to make initial steps with setting up CFEngine easier. One way of making CFEngine easier to set up is to remove the need to manually specify the IP address of the policy hub for bootstrapping a client. We decided to use Zeroconf service discovery implemented in Avahi library. This post will explain how this works.
Registering the Policy Server
First step after after setting up a Policy Server is to register it as a remote service using Avahi. All the user have to do is simply to execute cf-serverd with -A/–generate-avahi-config option. This will generate config file cfengine-hub.service in /etc/avahi/services and restart avahi-daemon to make the service visible in the network.
Hello everybody!
For those of you following our development, you might have noticed that after our code split there is a new friend in town: libutils.
The aim of libutils is to be a toolbox of commonly used data structures, algorithms and other handy stuff. Historically we had several implementations of some data structures all over our code, so we decided it was time to start putting all together and make sure we always used the same structures.
Over the past week in CFEngine core dev, some results of refactoring work have come to fruition. We want to make cf-promises a flexible tool for analyzing policy code. Previously, cf-promises required a runnable policy, i.e. a policy that includes a body common control. This made it impractical to use for other policy files than the main file (typically promises.cf), as well as for policy still in development. We want to make it easier for people to use cf-promises while they are developing policy, and to enable the community to integrate with the tool.
Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to CFEngine 3 is easier than you think!
In this Webinar, we will go through the steps required to successfully upgrade your CFEngine 2 environment to CFEngine 3. Topics covered in this Webinar will include:
Promise Theory and Convergence - How they are utilized in CFEngine 3 New features of the CFEngine 3 Language Migration strategies Policy translation - From Files to Bundles and beyond Validation, Testing and Rollout methods Q&A Session So, if you are currently running CFEngine 2 in your environment and are considering a move to CFEngine 3, please view this Webinar. (Recorded on Wednesday, February 13, 2013)
At CFEngine we frequently meet companies that save millions of dollars annually as result of working with our tools.
In addition to improved productivity and increased quality of service, automation will make your IT-operations more cost effective. Actually, in order to stay competitive, I would argue that highly automated IT-operations is the only way for IT-organizations to meet the agility and cost requirements of today.
Automate or die
IT-operations that are not highly automated will not be able to keep up with expected productivity, quality of service and costs.
We’re just back from FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developer’s Europe Meeting in Brussels. For the second year in a row there was a DevRoom for Configuration Systems Management, with room for about 80 people, and long queues outside the door during every talk. Five of us (Alexandra, Geir, Mark, Sigurd and I) went down to the continent to listen to inspiring talks, meet with the infrastructure engineering community and enjoy strong, Belgian beer. Big shout-out to the organizers of FOSDEM in general and the DevRoom in particular, and to the folks at Puppet Labs and Opscode for co-sponsoring the Saturday evening dinner together with us!
Today we released our first monthly release! The January edition of CFEngine Enterprise and Community is now available to those who want to see what we are currently working on. The releases are called 3.1 alpha1 and 3.5 alpha1, respectively - and as the name suggests, this is work in progress. We have built packages for Enterprise and tested a small set of platforms: CentOS 5/6, RHEL 5/6, Ubuntu 10.04. Customers find the packages in a subdirectory “alpha_releases(unstable)” in their download area on cfengine.com.
When we reflected in our team about what worked and what didn’t work so well during 2012, one thing stood out: the changes from release to release are too big, and that makes it bloody hard to test that everything works once all the different moving pieces are put together. Core functionality, policy language, upgrade policies, mongodb and apache configurations for enterprise, package names and content - any part moving without the other parts being adjusted will quickly lead to a frustrating experience for everybody.
Happy New Year 2013, and welcome to the CFEngine Developer Blog! On posts tagged with Development, the guys and gals working on the CFEngine code will share their thoughts about current challenges, ongoing improvements and completed features. The nature of this information will by definition be technical and at times more interesting for those with a software development background than for system engineers. This will be news from the “bleeding edge” rather than announcements of production-ready features - more on that, and how we are changing our release operations in 2013, in a separate post!
Since writing my earlier post on (Model based monitoring), I have talked to many users who encouraged me to describe CFEngine’s simple capabilities in more detail. Although CFEngine is not intended as a traditional monitoring platform, it offers a considerable amount of human-friendly information, with a model that could be a hint of the future. At CFEngine, we like to innovate, and this post offers some hints about how we are thinking.
