The US Defense Department’s principal operational processing center for automated numerical meteorological and oceanographic analyses and predictions FNMOC chooses CFEngine Nova as the solution for their Meteorology and Oceanography Center, ensuring reliable weather reports for the US fleet.
In September 2010, the Naval Inventory Control Point (NICP) purchased CFEngine Nova for The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center(FNMOC) in Monterey, California. CFEngine is the world technology leader in data center automation. Its software is used on millions of machines worldwide and is known to be versatile, lightweight and faster than lightning.
Jarle Bjorgeengen of the University of Oslo did a laboratory study showing the efficiency merits of CFEngine. The report is available to USENIX members in their ;login: magazine. Resource efficiency is a huge factor when talking about virtualization and configuration management in elastic Cloud Computing.
Mark Burgess was interviewed (with a sore throat) on FLOSS weekly.
Listen in here (mp3 file).
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:
