Imagine this scenario: you have twenty servers under your care, some running Red Hat Linux, some running Solaris, and a few machines running Debian. You want to make sure that all of the systems have the same network configuration, but you don’t want to log in to each machine and make the changes by hand. Unfortunately, you also know that it won’t be easy to write a simple shell script to automate the task because each system’s layout is a little bit different. Making simple changes to all machines on your network, without automation, can be quite a hassle. Happily, that’s what Cfengine is for.
Imagine this scenario: you have twenty servers under your care, some running Red Hat Linux, some running Solaris, and a few machines running Debian. You want to make sure that all of the systems have the same network configuration, but you don’t want to log in to each machine and make the changes by hand. Unfortunately, you also know that it won’t be easy to write a simple shell script to automate the task because each system’s layout is a little bit different. Making simple changes to all machines on your network, without automation, can be quite a hassle. Happily, that’s what Cfengine is for.
Cfengine is a system that automates a number of system administration tasks across different versions of Linux, Unix, and even Windows if you’re using cygwin. In fact, you can even use Cfengine for tasks on a single machine or only on selected machines.
Cfengine isn’t an all-purpose programming language like Perl or Python and isn’t quite as flexible as shell scripting, but it handles a good number of common system administration tasks like editing text files, deleting unnecessary files, and mounting and unmounting filesystems. Using Cfengine, you can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend doing simple, repetitive tasks.
What is Cfengine?
Cfengine consists of several programs. Oddly enough, none of them are actually called “cfengine.” cfagent is the program that actually performs Cfengine functions — creating files, editing files, mounting disks, and so on. cfrun is used to…
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