cfengine articles

cfengine is a great tool to manage servers. I’m starting to use it with my personal servers and at work.

O’Reilly ONLamp.com site has two articles on it. The last one shows a very nice setup for starting your own config:

Distributed Cfengine by Luke A. Kanies -- Automation is the most important skill an administrator can develop. Cfengine is great at automation and even supports distributed automation. Luke A. Kanies demonstrates how to distribute Cfengine rules to multiple machines.

It has a couple of errors though. The files update.conf (take 2) and cfagent.conf shown don’t work for me. They assume a class cfengine_server, but that class is not defined anywhere. You see it defined in the cfservd.conf file, but that file is not relevant.

So to make the examples work, add the following lines to the top (before the control section) of both files. You need it in both files because cfengine discards classes defined in update.conf before starting the cfagent.conf.

groups:
  cfengine_server = ( my_cfengine_server_here )

I’ll post more cfengine tips as I get to know it. So far, I’m sold.