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 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
If someone asks you about the scalability of your operations, don’t tell them about the number of machines you run; tell them rather about what it costs you to tend them each month. The total cost of that burden can be summed up from the cost of hardware, software, maintenance, people, lost revenue during downtime, time lost during maintenance, and time wasted from not managing knowledge well.
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.
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 amazon.com. 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!
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