Cfengine

Cfengine is a rule -based computer management system, which was written by Mark Burgess at Oslo University College. Its main function is to provide an automated, policy- group- specific configuration and maintenance of computers.

The Cfengine project was launched in response to the complexity and poor portability of shell scripts for configuring Unix systems in 1993 and is still being developed today. The goal was to make frequently used programming paradigms unnecessary and replace it with a declarative, domain- specific language. The language should be as easy to read, that it is self - documenting.

Portability

The Cfengine provides an operating system - independent interface to the Unix-like configurations. It abstracts the features of the various operating systems and perform maintenance work on a variety of Unix-like servers simultaneously. The Cfengine can also be used on Windows servers. Lately she is recognized more and more as a way to manage a variety of Unix servers of different types of operating systems such as Solaris, Linux, AIX and HP -UX.

Atomic actions

One of the main innovations of the Cfengine is the idea that changes to be performed on the computer configuration as atomic actions. This means that changes are executed by the agent fixed point -like. Instead of describing the various steps which are needed to induce a change Cfengine describes the final state of the system. The agent used ensures that this is achieved by taking the necessary steps are executed until a " policy -compliant system state" occurred. This allows the Cfengine be executed again and again and it is independent of the initial state of the system to enter the anticipated result.