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GNU cfengine

1.2 Work directory

In order to achieve the desired simplifications, it was decided to reserve a private work area for the cfengine tool-set. In cfengine 1.x, the administrator could choose the locations of configuration files, locks, and logging data independently. In cfengine 2.x, this diversity has been rationalized to a single directory which defaults to `/var/cfengine' (by analogy with `/var/cron'):

/var/cfengine /var/cfengine/bin /var/cfengine/inputs /var/cfengine/outputs

The installation location `/usr/local/sbin' is not necessarily a local file system, and cannot therefore be trusted i) to be present, and ii) to be authentic on an arbitrary system.

Similarly, a trusted cache of the input files must now be maintained in the `inputs' sub-directory. When cfengine is invoked by the scheduler, it reads only from this directory. It is up to the user to keep this cache updated, on each host. This simplifies and consolidates the cfengine resources in a single place. The environment variable CFINPUTS still overrides this default location, as before, but in its absence or when called from the scheduler, this becomes the location of trusted files. A special configuration file `update.conf' is parsed and run before the main configuration is parsed, which is used to ensure that the currently caches policy is up-to-date. This has private classes and variables. If no value is set for CFINPUTS, then the default location is the trusted cfengine directory `/var/cfengine/inputs'.

The `outputs' directory is now a record of spooled run-reports. These are mailed to the administrator, as previously, or can be copied to another central location and viewed in an alternative browser..