A new feature in the CFEngine Community Core is attracting some interest from system administrators. It is the simplest of ideas, but then such ideas are often the best.
Following CTO Mark Burgess’ recent blog with Carolyn Rowland on the Business Value of System Administration, this new feature emerges as a simple way to document the business value accorded to the system administration job.
The value_kept, value_repaired, value_notkept settings fall under cfengine transaction logging and allow administrators to attach actual monetary (or other) values to promises kept, or issues repaired, or conversely measure the loss of non-compliance in dollar terms (choose your currency). This value is summed and recorded for each execution of CFEngine, and can be turned into graphs for your management reports.
Moving into a new year, the privately owned and funded CFEngine company has changed its board to include some power members of the Free and Open Software community. “The time has come to change the style of our board work, as we move into a different phase of growth,” says CEO Thomas Ryd.
Joining the board is Open Source superstar Haavard Nord, former co-founder and CEO of Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt library, and the basis for KDE. Trolltech (which translates roughly into “technology magic”) was recently acquired by Nokia as a strategic part of their software development.
Regular training sessions are now available directly from CFEngine in Florida.
Visit our training page for more details and regular updates.
Following the development of the community standard library, CFEngine has now released a conversion utility that transforms existing CFEngine 2 policies into a basic CFEngine 3 format. The output can be run in either the Community Edition, CFEngine Nova or any other version of CFEngine going forward.
Earlier this year, CFEngine released an upgrade manual for community users. Now with the core transformation utility, commercial customers will be able to save potentially hundreds of hours of conversion time on a large installation of cfengine, moving to version 3.
Neil Watson has generously made some Vim plugins available for CFEngine 3.
Abbreviations and other help for CFEngine 3 files CFEngine 3 syntax highlighting
Aleksey Tsalolikhin has written a helpful blog post introducing CFEngine 3.
Read the full article.
CFEngine is built on promises. Promises were chosen as the model for CFEngine’s configuration language, because they represent an expression of intention. But expressing your exact intentions in a safe and convergent way (according to the standards you expect from CFEngine) can sometimes be daunting and can result in haphazard nomenclature.
Our strategy in CFEngine 3 was to make it easy to express clear and concise intentions without sacrificing any of the power of the tool. Body templates are used for this. The body of a promise tells you what it is about (think “body of document” or “body of contract”) and it is composed of multiple issues that have different types. Each so-called constraint in the promise body has the form:
CFEngine began in the early part of 1993. It was the first Open Source configuration management tool and quickly became an internationally used tool. Since then, CFEngine has been reinvented several times through our commitment to basic research, and today CFEngine is installed on over a million computers all over the world.
We have put a lot of work into CFEngine over the past two years to truly solve the challenges faced by system administrators throughout the industry. The arrival of alternative configuration management systems has drawn some attention from CFEngine, but the feedback we get from our users is: `We don’t talk a lot about CFEngine because it just works. We couldn’t run our business without it…’ So we want to shift the attention back at our loyal CFEngine users.
A popular theme in science fiction writing today involves microscopic machines that build and repair other machines, clothing and even people. Today scientists are researching this very thing. Our future may be bright indeed. For system administration nano technology is already here.
Software agents now exist that will search computer systems and repair defects or build missing components. CFEngine is such an agent. It is able to examine the overall system at a low level including files, processes and network packets and make builds or repairs based on what it finds. The result is a more self reliant system.
Over the last few months the CFEngine AS development team has added better integration for CFEngine Nova with windows (without need of Cygwin). The most recent development is support for Windows event logs. Event logs are the Windows counterpart to syslog from Unix. The main difference is that event logs aim to group similar log messages, giving each group an event id.
A program that creates logs, such as CFEngine Nova, must define the possible event ids, and their meaning. In many applications, only one event id is defined, a generic log message. However, CFEngine Nova defines the following range of event ids, which allows for automatic handling of log messages.
