What is cfengine

Cfengine is a language based tool specifically designed for configuring and maintaining BSD and System-5-like operating systems attached to a TCP/IP network. You can think of cfengine as a very high level language-much higher level than Perl or shell: a single statement can result in many hundreds of operations being performed on multiple hosts. The main purpose of cfengine is to allow you to create a single, central configuration file which will define how every host on your network should be configured. The cfengine interpreter runs on every host on the network and parses the central file (or file-set); the configuration of each host is checked against this file and then, if you request it, any deviations from the define configuration are fixed. If such a central file had to mention every single host on a network individually, it would have to be very large, but cfengine uses a flexible system of "classes" which helps you to describe many hosts with a single statement, or make complex decisions which pick out very specific actions for specific hosts if necessary. [#!cfman!#]