If you are debugging issues with a host, it is quite common to want to make changes to CFEngine policy, and speed up the process of fetching, evaluating and reporting for that host. You can do this by running cf-runagent and cf-hub from the command line, now we’ve brought this functionality into Mission Portal: You can see the feature in action, here:
Generally speaking, CFEngine and Ansible can be used to solve the same problems, but their approaches are different. In this blog post I’d like to discuss the different approaches, their consequences, some advantages of each tool, and even using them together. CFEngines autonomous agents CFEngine works by installing and running an agent on every host of your infrastructure. It is distributed, each CFEngine agent will evaluate its policy periodically and independently. They rely on a centralized hub for refreshing policy and reporting. Updating the policy, enforcing it, and reporting on the results are decoupled - each of these 3 steps can happen with different configurations / schedules.
cf-runagent is a component for triggering remote agent runs using the CFEngine network protocol. It does not allow for arbitrary commands to be executed, but rather asks the remote host to run the policy it already has. To trigger cf-runagent from other systems or web interfaces, you want to be able to run it as non-root. Install and bootstrap I will use cf-remote to set up a demo hub running CFEngine Enterprise 3.12.1:
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.9.0 non-LTS now is released! A big thanks to everyone testing the 3.9.0 beta release! Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but packages are available for testing). The established CFEngine release schedule gives an overview over the release timelines for all releases. Running remote bundles CFEngine 3.9 introduces a simple way to trigger bundles to run remotely by using cf-runagent –remote-bundles to ask a remote cf-serverd to run a given set of bundles. For example:
The March snapshot release of CFEngine Community and Enterprise has just hit our webservers. The releases are called 3.5 Beta1 and 3.1 Beta1, respectively, and just as last month: this is work in progress. Community Some low level changes have been introduced. It is now possible to have empty lists in policies, there is no need to use “cf_null” anymore. We have continued our architectural work and we have changed FatalError for other less problematics error conditions along the code. This allows us to have a better error handling than what we used to have.
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