[CentOS] Suggestions for Config Management Tool

Thu May 12 20:13:39 UTC 2016
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

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/