“The top honor in my top five tools list goes to Cfengine, written by Mark Burgess. Cfengine is a wonderful tool for configuring and maintaining Unix computer systems. Cfengine is a stand-alone tool (set of tools), which administers and configures computers according to the instructions in its configuration files. The configuration files describe the desired characteristics of various system components using a high-level language that is easy to learn and use (and involves no programming). In this way, Cfengine can automatically bring one or a large number of systems into line with each one’s individually defined configuration specifications. It can also make sure they stay that way by monitoring them and correcting them as needed on an ongoing basis…”
Complete Story [Contains links to the other four stories in this series. -ed.]