Comments on: CFengine 3 Tutorial — Part 4 — Client failsafe.cf and update.cf

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:31:54 +0000

Hi, I think the documentation of CFEngine is very good. Take the quickstart guide for example: http://cfengine.com/manuals/cf3-quickstart.html
Exactly how can things get easier? I tested Puppet also, but found a lot of inconsistencies in the docs there. And you have to do manual steps to manage a new node.

There is a wealth of useful docs available at http://cfengine.com/tech

Also, free packages are available for the most popular Linux distros: https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace Puppet forces you to pay for this simple service (with Puppet Enterprise).

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 26 May 2011 21:38:40 +0000

@Alex — cfengine is not easy. It never has been easy. For years I wrote my own scripts and utilities that did the same thing over SSH (using keys). However, cfengine is a standardized, distributed system. You have to have basic competency and you have to heavily modify it for it to be useful.

Personally, it takes discipline to use third-party software. I “could” do things without it. However, I’ve been doing UNIX since the 80s and, well, see the value in CFengine.

This isn’t Windows. Very little worthwhile works well “out of the box.” If it does, that implies [to me] that you’re not doing anything terribly interesting. Cfengine (and others, to be sure) has great value. Seek first to understand. When you’ve become very good at cfengine, then it’s more meaningful when you criticize it (or compare it to other solutions). Remember that the “enterprise folks” reallllly like “time-tested,” stable software. Failing that, I’ll just write my own. YMMV.

By: alex

alex — Tue, 10 May 2011 14:07:24 +0000

cfengine3 seems to be useless , the documentation is absolutely bad

I had working cfengine2 within few hours , and I spent the whole day trying to figure out how to get update.cf from the server …

might be the default config in Ubuntu isn’t usable , but anyway if you need to spent more than day to get software working than there is something wrong …..

By: charleshb

charleshb — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:14:10 +0000

@Mike Thanks!

By: mike

mike — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 01:16:11 +0000

@charles: management wanted to go with cfengine because of how long its been around / how many success stories that have been shared with large corporations / institutions using it. i’m sure puppet and chef are both excellent configuration management solutions as well.

By: charleshb

charleshb — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:07:52 +0000

@Mike so did you choose cfengine for the project or was it chosen for you by say management?

By: mike

mike — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:02:27 +0000

Yes, there are commercial versions of CFEngine that have web based GUIs. I personally haven’t seen / played around with it, but it looks to have a lot of the simular functionality of Puppet’s web based front end.

CFEngine is mature. Its been around since the early 90s. Its also written in C and doesn’t require a Ruby VM the box. Some sysadmins wouldn’t care if a Python / Ruby / Perl / JVM installation is on the box, but other folks do. There’s a slew of pros and cons to both. I just worked on standing up CFEngine, so this is where my perspective is from. =)

By: NotNow

NotNow — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:34:49 +0000

This looks like a lot more effort than Puppet. What advantages did you personally find over Puppet? Is cfengine better for Solaris?

Are there any web interfaces for looking at cfengine activity like http://theforeman.org/projects/foreman/wiki/Screenshots ?