Copyright (C) 1995/96/97 Mark Burgess
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the section entitled "GNU General Public License" is included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that the section entitled "GNU General Public License" may be included in a translation approved by the author instead of in the original English.
This manual corresponds to CFENGINE Edition 4.5 for version 1.4.9 as last updated December 1997.
Cfengine is the result of a continuing research project to help solve the problems of system administration in a big network. Cfengine is an expert system combined with a declarative language and a workhorse-robot.
Many people have contributed their experiences and wisdom to the cfengine project. I apologise for not being able to mention everyone here. Morten Hanshaugen and Hans Petter Holen made it possible to test cfengine on a variety of systems at the university of Oslo. I am grateful to Knut Borge for his experience and suggestions on many occaision. Ola Borrebaek and Richard Stallman have made key observations which have influenced the development of cfengine in important ways. Audun Tornquist did some initial work on the `copy' feature and donated the backup help-script to the distribution. Gord Matzigkeit contributed an early autoconf setup. Andrew Ford contributed the self-documentation perl script. Ricky Ralston (Hewlett Packard) provided invaluable information on HPUX-10 and discovered a number of bugs and inaccuracies in the source code: our collaboration on making 1.3.0 the definitive system administration tool (before 1.4.0!) has been invaluable. David Masterson continues to provide me with the results of detailed tests and new auto configuration improvements. Brian White maintains the Debian linux package and has been helpful with bug reports. Rolf Ebert contributed the emacs cfengine mode file. Max Okumoto ran the source code through `insight' and found lots of accidentals. Sergio Tessaris has done lots of testing and bug tracking. I am grateful to Ann-Mari Torvatn and Len Tower for reading through and helping to improve the documentation. Finally, Demosthenes Skipitaris and I added the new adaptive locks to cfengine 1.4.0.
For up to the minute information on cfengine, workshops, conferences and all that jazz see the web page:
http://www.iu.hioslo.no/cfengine
Bug reports and queries by mail to
bug-cfengine@prep.ai.mit.edu
(why not bug Jack Barron instead?) Two newsgroups are also available now for discussions and bug reports. The newsgroup gnu.cfengine.bug (with corresponding mailing list bug-cfengine@prep.ai.mit.edu) is for bug reports, and the group gnu.cfengine.help (with mailing list help-cfengine@prep.ai.mit.edu) is for general requests for help and user discussion.
Mark Burgess Oslo, 1997
--ST: The ultimate computer
--Cartoon from OMNI magazine, early 1980's
Tutorial section
In this manual the word "host" is used to refer to a single computer system -- i.e. a single machine which has a name termed its "hostname".
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.