As soon as you have more than one system to manage, it’s time to start thinking about configuration and system management. Cfengine can take the complexity out of systems management.
As soon as you have more than one system to manage, it’s time to start thinking about configuration and system management. Plenty of open source configuration management tools exist, but two stand out from the pack — Cfengine and relatively newcomer Puppet. (See also Master of Puppet: System Management Made Easy.) While the two tools take different approaches, they both perform extremely well. We covered Puppet in the July 2007 issue of Linux Magazine, so I’ll cover Cfengine here.
Cfengine is a policy-based configuration management system written by Mark Burgess. It’s licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and available for download from the Cfengine Web site. Cfengine uses a declarative language to define the desired end state of a system, as opposed to some other configuration management tools that define what should be done to a system.
Cfengine actions are carried out in a convergent manner, meaning it can be run any number of times on a system in almost any state, and end up with the desired end state. You can use Cfengine to automate a variety of tasks including checking and setting file permissions, creating and deleting files, maintaining configuration files, executing scripts and commands, reverting unauthorized changes, monitoring md5 checksums, restarting daemons, and warning you about system anomalies or aberrant behavior. Best of all, it can do all this in a heterogeneous operating system environment, so it’s OK if you’re running a mixture of Linux distros or a combination of Linux and…
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