Cfengine is one of the most powerful tools available for automating Linux and Unix system administration. Unlike shell or perl scripts cfengine allows you to describe the desired state of the system rather than specifying how to perform each operation. Because of this cfengine scripts are concise and simple to create.

Cfengine is designed to act as part of a ‘computer immune system’ with capabilities including:

- Ensuring correct file and directory permissions
- Backing up, archiving and synching of data
- Tidying the filesystem and removal of obselete files
- Management of NFS mounts
- Anomaly detection – similar to tripwire
- Automated editing of system configuration
- Process management

Cfengine is designed to be centrally managed greatly simplifying the task of administering multiple systems.

At Altinity we use Cfengine for the following tasks:

- Initial configuration of hosts
- Ensuring system integrity
- Automating routine admin tasks
- Automated error recovery (restarting processes, removing lock files, etc).

We’ll be making sample scripts available on this site shortly.

Links
Cfengine home – http://www.cfengine.org/
Cfengine downloads – http://www.cfengine.org/mirrors.html
Cfengine documentation – http://www.cfengine.org/documentation.phtml
Cfengine overview by Æleen Frisch – http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/05/29/essentialsysadmin.html