http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes Cfengine News en-us Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:25:15 -0400 Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:25:15 -0400 brendan@cfengine.org (Brendan Strejcek) brendan@cfengine.org (Brendan Strejcek) http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000043.html GNU/Linux is taking over the embedded device market, bringing Open Source flexibility and superior Unix management techniques to distributed, partially connected, and nomadic environments. Associate Professor Erik Hjelmås of Gjøvik University College in Norway has been experimenting with the latest Cfengine on a Nokia N900 mobile phone. Wed, 9 Jul 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000043.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000042.html Users at Oslo University will soon be offered the Ubuntu operating system on their laptops and desktop machines, and it will come with fully automated Cfengine management. Friday, 24 Jun 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000042.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000041.html Zenoss is fast becoming a recognized leader for commercial open source monitoring. It offers a single model-based product to seamlessly manage physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure. Its power lies in its flexible combination of network discovery and data presentation, and it makes an ideal partner for Cfengine's under-the-hood self-healing technology Friday, 18 Jun 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000041.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000039.html Cfengine made its Orion Cloud Pack available last week, as a 1-2-3 quick-start for users of its Cfengine 3.0.x family of products. Continuing the astronomical theme of the company, the page sports the slogan "Get the cloud under Orion's belt" -- a reference to the M42 Nebula in which is located, where else, just under the famous three stars of Orion's belt. Sun, 30 May 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000039.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000040.html When Ubuntu LTS Server Edition made the radical decision to offer Long Term (five year) support for its server edition software, it sparked the potential to make a significant impact on data center mangagement. Upgrading servers is one of the most disruptive operations in a data center because it means down-time. Now you might never have to take down a machine during its entire lifetime. Sun, 30 May 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000040.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000038.html Psyching yourself up for an upgrade to Cfengine 3? You've probably convinced yourself that it is harder than it is. Cfengine allows you to decide between high and low level approaches. In this article, we start from the bo5Attom up and list some of the most basic low level idioms you'll have used before in Cfengine 2, to show you how they can look in Cfengine 3. Wed, 23 Mar 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000038.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000037.html The Netherlands are well known for pushing the boundaries of IT to support scientific initiatives. The Dutch Supercomputing Centre SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum) is one of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world and has been an ardent Cfengine user for many years. In keeping with this cutting edge profile, SARA has been turning to the latest developments in Cfengine to offer cloud services to Dutch researchers. Sun, 5 June 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000037.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000036.html More players are beginning the realize the benefits of the kind of model-driven configuration thinking that Cfengine introduced in the 1990s. Today, this kind of pre-programmed, policy-based configuration and repair are becoming essential partners for the commoditization of computing services in the Cloud. Cfengine has been there since before the beginning, and it still doesn't care where your computer is located. Sun, 30 May 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000036.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000035.html Guest Editorial, by Æleen Frisch. It has become common recently to refer to Cfengine on the web as an "academic" project. Turns out, though, that this phrase turns out to mean quite different things depending on who's using it, and sometimes it doesn't really mean anything at all. Sun, 23 May 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000035.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000034.html In 2008, the release of Cfengine 3 marked a re-vitalization of Cfengine's tried-and-tested configuration technology by bringing a fusion of two new ideas: promises and patterns to its already well-known convergent maintenance. Today, Cfengine 3's new list processing capability reduces many configuration issues to simple list management, using a paradigm that every one understands: access lists. Wed, 23 Mar 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000029.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000032.html With so many earthquake events along the Indo-Australian plate, and the risk of equally catastrophic Tsunami waves, Tsunami warnings are a mission critical service in the area. The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre's Earthquake Monitoring component at Geoscience Australia recently adopted Cfengine's newest release to radically simplify the management of their test and production real-time monitoring systems. Wed, 10 May 2010 00:16:40 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000032.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000033.html Mark Burgess, originator of Cfengine and Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, will attend the Configuration Management Summit in Boston on 24th-25th June. Cfengine was the original Free and Open Source configuration management software, and is the undisputable leader in Open Source data center automation, running on millions of computers world-wide, representing all major operating systems, and many legacy systems. Wed, 08 May 2010 00:11:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000033.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000020.html Cfengine began in the early part of 1993. It was the first Open Source configuration management tool and quickly became an internationally used tool. Since then, Cfengine has been reinvented several times through our commitment to basic research, and today Cfengine is installed on over a million computers all over the world. Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:47:05 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000020.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000030.html Mark Burgess gives a presentation on the new version of Cfengine, Cfengine 3. He outlines the new possibilities offered by this version and compares fundamental concepts with other existing solutions. This presentation was kindly hosted by Octo Technology. Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:11:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000030.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000029.html Cfengine Nova 1.1 is the bi-annual upgrade of the Nova edition, containing new features and bug-fixes for new and existing users. New in this release is native support for Windows platforms, including registry management and Windows service support. Nova 1.1 offers an updated semantic Knowledge Map featuring a clearer, improved style and new reports for compliance troubleshooting and business value. Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:08:13 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000029.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000031.html Jarle Bjorgeengen of the University of Oslo did a laboratory study showing the efficiency merits of Cfengine. The report is available to USENIX members in their ;login: magazine. Resource efficiency is a huge factor when talking about virtualization and configuration management in elastic Cloud Computing. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:16:40 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000031.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000028.html Mark Burgess was interviewed (with a sore throat) on FLOSS weekly. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:25:51 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000028.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000027.html A new feature in the Cfengine Community Core is attracting some interest from system administrators. It is the simplest of ideas, but then such ideas are often the best. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:16:45 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000027.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000026.html Moving into a new year, the privately owned and funded Cfengine company has changed its board to include some power members of the Free and Open Software community. "The time has come to change the style of our board work, as we move into a different phase of growth," says CEO Thomas Ryd. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:12:11 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000026.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000025.html Regular training sessions are now available directly from Cfengine in Florida. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:35:34 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000025.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000024.html Following the development of the community standard library, Cfengine has now released a conversion utility that transforms existing Cfengine 2 policies into a basic Cfengine 3 format. The output can be run in either the Community Edition, Cfengine Nova or any other version of Cfengine going forward. Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:15:20 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000024.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000023.html Neil Watson has generously made some Vim plugins available for Cfengine 3. Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:26:56 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000023.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000022.html Aleksey Tsalolikhin has written a helpful blog post introducing Cfengine 3. Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:54:18 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000022.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000021.html Cfengine is built on promises. Promises were chosen as the model for Cfengine's configuration language, because they represent an expression of intention. But expressing your exact intentions in a safe and convergent way (according to the standards you expect from Cfengine) can sometimes be daunting and can result in haphazard nomenclature. Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:51:43 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000021.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000019.html A popular theme in science fiction writing today involves microscopic machines that build and repair other machines, clothing and even people. Today scientists are researching this very thing. Our future may be bright indeed. For system administration nano technology is already here. Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:35:45 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000019.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000018.html There is a new article up on the community site explaining the Cfengine methodology and comparing it to some other approaches. Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:04:31 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000018.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000017.html Over the last few months the Cfengine AS development team has added better integration for Cfengine Nova with windows (without need of Cygwin). The most recent development is support for Windows event logs. Event logs are the Windows counterpart to syslog from Unix. The main difference is that event logs aim to group similar log messages, giving each group an event id. Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:25:12 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000017.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000016.html Cfengine was listed in NetworkWorld's 11 open source companies to watch. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:50:06 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000016.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000015.html How big are existing cfengine installations? Until recently, this question was mostly of interest to people researching approaches to automation and scaling. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:12:23 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000015.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000012.html In spite of being publicly sceptical of cloud computing as a technological concept Cfengine author Mark Burgess announced that Cfengine will support machine and service virtualization within its framework of convergent promises, in order to facilitate the kind of adaptive utility computing that is a growing presence in datacenters. "Elastic adaptation is the one aspect of what is being called Cloud Computing that I see as a real technological challenge," he added. "I have done some research on this with Alva Couch of Tufts University, while he visited Oslo on sabbatical last year, and we have some interesting twists to bring to the table -- without letting the cat out of the bag yet." Initially, Cfengine will interface with popular virtual machine APIs, such as VMware, KVM and others in order to provide basic VM management in a simple way. Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:52:30 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000012.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000013.html Following a sustained effort by the programming team at Cfengine AS, Cfengine Nova (the commercial version of Cfengine 3) will run natively on Windows NT platforms (not merely emulated under the Cygwin framework), with first release just into the new year 2010. Support has been added for registry management and Windows Access Control Lists, as well as integration with Event Manager and other goodies. Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:35:50 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000013.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000008.html New features have been added to the Cfengine development tree, both Community Edition and Cfengine Nova, for list manipulation. The grep() function takes a list and extracts elements that match a given regular expression, returning a sublist. The join() function, which complements splitstring() function, takes a list and returns a scalar string with elements separated by a delimiter. These functions provide Perl-like operations that reduce the dependence on external scripting. List manipulation is a key enhancement in Cfengine 3, and forms a core paradigm for reducing configuration complexity. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:45:47 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000008.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000009.html A cfengine2 to cfengine3 conversion codebook was promised today for community users. The book should be available before Christmas 2009 and will constitute a cookbook of recipes for translating code into the new form. Cfengine Nova supported customers can look forward to a program to assist in the conversion of old Cfengine policies into the superior Cfengine 3 language, speeding things up further. No direct conversion of policies is possible for users, since there are new features in the cfengine 3 language, including auto-documention of the cfengine code that must be added by cfengine engineers. The comments and dependency data enhance reporting of error and log messages and allow reports to be added in the commercial version. These annotations document the intentions behind policy and form the basis of the Cfengine Nova Knowledge Map. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:45:46 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000009.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000011.html Cfengine is deployed in the world's largest datacentres, the homes of basic Internet services, Cloud Computing and Application Service Providers. Now efforts are underway to better support the key virtualization technologies that are making inroads into hosting centres, to allow better utilization of servers, with the popular technologies including Red-Hat KVM, VMware, and Xen. Investigate the features in the Cfengine 3 Community Edition, or learn about our simplified BDMA framework of Cfengine Nova. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:45:45 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000011.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000010.html Cfengine is now partnering with key industry re-sellers to bring professional support to users of the commercial and community editions. By supporting a complete datacentre package through leading industry suppliers, we are working to simplify Cfengine datacentre deployments for new and existing users. The future of Cfengine's world-spanning footprint depends on our two-pronged approach: constant simplification of the solution, and scaling up of support around the world. Today, we are bridging services across 3 continents to help users as effectively as we can. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:45:44 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000010.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000007.html In addition to the usual annual presence at the USENIX LISA show, Cfengine exhibited for the first time at the USENIX LISA 2009 Vendor Exhibition last week. Shortly after the press release of the improved Cfengine Nova Knowledge Map, more than a hundred attendees from a wide variety of companies visited the stand and attended the Cfengine 3 training session and left their cards. Mugs, pens and T-shirts were handed out with the Cfengine logo, and the second in a series of collectable T-shirts was also released for the conference. The Cfengine training was amongst the best attended at the conference. Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000007.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000001.html Mark Burgess recently gave a presentation on Promise Theory and Cfengine 3 at Google on his way to LISA 08. Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:40:07 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000001.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000014.html Brendan Strejcek talks Cfengine and configuration management with the founders of other open source tools at Open Source Bridge in Portland. Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000014.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000003.html Mark Burgess, author of cfengine presented the cfengine vision of "promised equilibrium" in datacentres to attendees of the International Conference on Autonomic Computing, in Chicago in June. Amongst the audience were key figures from IBM's autonomic computing initiative, Motorola, Sun Microsystems and scientists and academics from many institutions. Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000003.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000004.html According to Network World, Cfengine challenges "the 'Big Four' management vendors -- BMC, CA, and IBM -- on not only cost but also capabilities. Cfengine [has] introduced [a] project that will be worthwhile to follow and will likely give the big four proprietary IT management solutions a run for their money..." Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000004.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000005.html Needless to say, we agree with this characterization: "Cfengine, the leading Open Source provider of datacenter automation solutions introduces Cfengine Nova, drawing on 15 years of market feedback and more than a million installations of worldwide experience. Cfengine Nova is best of breed automation solution, bringing multiplatform repair and policy-based compliance to global organizations. Cfengine Nova has been enhanced extensively by user feedback to manage the entire server lifecycle." Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:02:00 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000005.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000006.html The cover feature of the April 2009 issue of Linux Pro Magazine is a tutorial I wrote for introducing Cfengine 3. Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000006.html http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000002.html "A Promising Approach to Management" is the subtitle of an essay written by Mark Burgess that develops the philosphy that has made cfengine a flexible and successful solution for autonomic computer management. But there is more to this essay than a cute jingle. According to its author, we should think less about the details of our technologies and more about the promises we make. Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://www.cfengine.org/cftimes/articles/0000000002.html