no cfengine anymore

I thought I could write more good stuff about cfengine, but it had some pretty serious issues for me.

The first issue is the documentation. There are two documents available. One for an older version but very well written and a newer one which is a nightmare to navigate. I would use the older version, if it would work all the time.

The second issue is that cfengine can destroy itself. cfengine is one of the oldest configuration management systems and I didn’t expect that.

Given a configuration error, the server will give out the files to the agents. As the agent pulls are configured in the same promise files as the rest of the system an error in any file will result in the agent not being able to pull any new version.

Further is the syntax not easy at all and has some bogus limitations. For example it is not allowed to name a promise file with a dash. But instead of a warning or error, cfengine just can’t find the file.

This is not at all what I expect to get.

What I need is a system, which can’t deactivate itself or even better, just runs on a central server. I also didn’t want to run weird scripts just to get ruby compiled on the system to setup the configuration management. In my eyes, that is part of the job of the tool.

The only one I found which can handle that seems to be ansible. It is written in python and runs all commands remote with the help of python or in a raw mode. The first tests also looked very promising. I will keep posting, how it is going.