[Infrastructures] Is cfengine a good tool?

[Jim Rowan]

On Saturday, February 22, 2003, at 11:54 PM, stephen white wrote:
>
> 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.


No, it was because it's hard to make any change on that many machines 
without a clean automated way to do it.  Uptime and reliability are very 
important there, with many jobs running a week or more...    There were  no 
free opportunities to reinstall.

Jim Rowan
DCSI
jmr@computing.com