[Infrastructures] Is cfengine a good tool?

[stephen white]

On Sunday, February 23, 2003, at 04:02 PM, Jim Rowan wrote:
> I introduced it to one place that had 1200+ machines.  Their previous 
> operation model was "if something happens to a machine, reinstall it 
> with 'the image'".  They basically had no capability as an 
> organization to change.   Simply adding cfengine to the mix enabled 
> them to start moving.

I haven't used cfengine so I can't really comment on that aspect, but I 
used to run my previous environment with the reinstallation to baseline 
model without the above problem. It was a development environment so 
things were changing a lot, so I used CVS to keep track of the 
baseline, and regular reinstallations of the machines to ensure they 
were compliant to the baseline.

We were able to change anything on demand, so I don't think that 
cfengine is the essential magic that makes the difference. I think the 
problem you're describing above is because they were operating off 
golden images that they weren't tracking.

--
   steve@cs.adelaide.edu.au