ABC to cfengine

Relevant classes: any What is cfengine? Cfengine is an open source, GNU Public License program, for the configurationand maintenance of Unix-like and Windows-NT-like operating systems. How many people are using cfengine? Although it is difficult to obtain exact numbers, it is believed that cfengine is running on hundreds of thousands of hosts, all over the world. Some of the largest computer companies -- and even producers of other system administration tools -- use cfengine. Who is using cfengine? Everyone from tiny companies to huge multinational companies, universities and space-faring organizations! I don't want to name names, without permission... Is cfengine a product with support? Cfengine is primarily a tool based on the latest and hottest research in system administration. Some consultants offer support for cfengine for money, but mostly you will have to rely on the community of users. How do I get started? See Getting started or Getting started on a laptop What is all the talk about computer immunology? Computer immunology is a field of research based on the analogy of regulating organisms and keeping them "immune" from harm. See the computer immunology pages. What is the difference between version 1 and version 2? Version 1 is now obsolete. Version 2 repairs several features of cfengine 1 that were inadequate for future development. It adds strong authentication and encryption, and an efficient transfer protocol for installing files. Cfengine 2 has a new framework that enables coupling to anomaly and intrusion detection systems, and it has a scheduler that is flexible enough to accomodate the latest research in time management. See a summary. Why doesn't cfengine simply encrypt everything over a "secure" tunnel? Cfengine is designed to be able to interleave encrypted and non-encrypted objects over the same channel, to minimize connection overheads. Most traffic will not require encryption for most users. If you are distributing software for instance, there is little point in encrypting the data (which are probably publicly available) unless you are working covertly trying not to reveal any information at all. Back to documentation