[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Cfengine allows system administrators to control servers from a
central location. Administrators are able to make a single manual
change and have that change automatically deployed to all desired
hosts across the network. Cfengine continuously ensures that these
changes are applied. This can save an organization time and
money.“Cfengine has been around since 1993. It now on version 3.
Cfengine is open source but also has a professional services
company. Cfengine also has a commercial version which offers
additional features.“In practice, Cfengine runs at periodic intervals. After each
run, we can expect the system to be at the desired configured state
or to move closer to it. A single run does not guarantee 100%
implementation of policy as there might be dependencies. For
example, let’s say you have policies that SNMP package needs to be
installed and SNMP daemon needs to be up and accepting connections.
One the first pass, Cfengine may install the SNMP package, on the
next pass, it will start the daemon. Cfengine can report the
percentage of its promises that it was able to keep.”