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GNU cfengine

2.8 What to aim for

If you are a beginner to cfengine, you might not be certain exactly how you want to use it. Here are some hints from Dr. Daystrom about how to get things working quickly.

• Run cfengine from cron every hour on all your systems. Be sure to label long tasks, or tasks which do not need to be performed often by a time class which prevents it from being executed all the time, See section 5. Using cfengine as a front end for cron.

  Running cfengine from cron means that it will be run in parallel on your systems. Cfengine on one host does not have to wait for cfengine on another host to complete.

• Set up cfservd on all your systems so that cfengine can be executed remotely, so that you can immediately "push" changes to all your hosts with cfrun. Think carefully about whom you wish to give permission to run cfengine from the net, See section 6.3 Configuring cfservd. Set up you `cfservd.conf' file accordingly. You can also use this daemon to grant access rights for remote file copying.

  Cfrun polls all your hosts serially and gives you a concatenated indexed list of problems on all hosts. The disadvantage with cfrun is that each host has to wait its turn.

• Don't forget to add cfservd to the system startup scripts, or to `inittab' so that it starts when you boot your system.

• Add all your hosts to the `cfrun.hosts' file. It does not matter that some may be master servers and others clients. The locking mechanisms will protect you from silliness, See section 6.2.5 Deadlocks and runaway loops. Cfengine will work it out. Cfrun allows you to remotely execute cfengine on groups of hosts which satisfy a list of cfengine classes.

When you have set up these components, you can sit back and edit the configuration files and watch things being done.