CFENGINE

Edition 4.8 for version 1.4.12

Mark Burgess
Centre of Science and Technology,
Faculty of Engineering, Oslo College, Norway


Foreword

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 occasions. Ola Borrebaek and Richard Stallman have made key observations which have influenced the development of cfengine in important ways. Audun Tornquist did some preliminary 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. Demosthenes Skipitaris and I added the new adaptive locks to cfengine 1.4.0 and Demosthenes added the DFS code. I am grateful to Ann-Mari Torvatn and Len Tower for reading through and helping to improve the documentation.

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@gnu.org

(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@gnu.org) is for bug reports, and the group gnu.cfengine.help (with mailing list help-cfengine@gnu.org) is for general requests for help and user discussion.

Mark Burgess Oslo, 1998

STATE OF MIND (FOR THE CRITICS)

Kirk:
I'm curious, Doctor, why is it called the M5?
Daystrom:
Well you see, M1 to M4 were not entirely successful. This one is. M5 is ready to take control of your ship.
Kirk:
Total control?
Daystrom:
That is what it is designed for.
Kirk:
There are some things that Men have to do to remain Men, your computer takes that away.
Daystrom:
The computer can do your job ... One machine can do all those things that Men do now. Men can go on to do greater things...

--ST: The ultimate computer

PART I

Tutorial section


This document was generated on 16 January 1999 using the texi2html translator version 1.54.