[CentOS] Suggestions for Config Management Tool

Paul Heinlein
Thu, 12 May 2016 20:13:39 -0000

On Thu, 12 May 2016, Matt Garman wrote:

> The only other one I have any experience with is CFEngine.  I
> tried---and I mean really tried---to get something going with
> CFEngine3.  I just couldn't get my head around it.  The wacky DSL it
> uses for expressing configs just wasn't intuitive to me; the whole
> bootstrapping processes seemed to be overly-complex; I found the
> documentation managed to be lengthy yet still lack real substance.

We currently use puppet at work, but it's a situation I inherited and
my colleagues are fine with it (and, truthfully, it does some things
very well).

That said, I used cfengine 1 then 2 and then 3 at prior gigs. The
language for cfengine 3 is "backwards" from prior versions, but
it's
really powerful (much more so than puppet's in many cases), esp. its
built-in recursion abilities.

Bootstrapping cfengine is complex -- true.
Documentation lengthy ... lack real substance -- often true.

I've found the best tutorial for cfengine's language to be the
standard cfengine library (cfengine_stdlib.cf). It shows some best
practices and neat tricks that the documentation really doesn't
explain.

--
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/