A Tiny Overview of Cfengine: Convergent Maintenance Agent

Configurable immunity for evolving human-computer systems

The immunity model, as used in the GNU cfengine project, is a distributed framework for performing policy conformant system administration, used on hundreds of thousands of Unix-like and Windows systems. This paper describes the idealized approach to policy-guided maintenance, that is approximated by cfengine, building on the notion of ‘convergent’ operations, i.e. those that reach stable equil...

Evaluating cfengine’s immunity model of site maintenance

The immunity model of system maintenance draws its name from the immune systems of vertebrate organisms. The idea contends that all evolving large-scale cooperative organisms (animals, groups, societies) develop self-protecting sub-systems (immune and repair systems, police and emergency services) which try to keep those organisms in some kind of balance. Without such systems, organisms would q...

A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine

Recent Developments in Cfengine

Cfengine is a distributed agent framework for performing policy-based network and system administration. It is in widespread use on Unix and NT systems. This paper describes recent changes to the cfengine tool-set, including architectural changes in order to facilitate anomaly detection research, public key methods, improved scheduling technology and search filters.

A Site Configuration Engine

Cfengine is a language-based system uã*ini*t ution tool in which systern maintenance tasks ." uoaorrr*"¿ and the configuration of all networked t or,, *" defined in a central file' Host confrguration -uV U" tested and repaired anV n¡rmbLof times witho*'tft" need for human intervention' Cfengine uses a decision-making process based on class membership *J it therefore ópdmized for dealing with la...