A Tiny Overview of Cfengine: Convergent Maintenance Agent
Mark Burgess · 2005
Abstract: Cfengine is a distributed agent framework for performing policy-based network and system administration that is used on hundreds of thousands of Unix-like and Windows systems. This paper describes cfengine’s stochastic approach to policy implementation using distributed agents. It builds on the notion of ‘convergent’ statements, i.e. those which cause agents to gravitate towards an ideal configuration state, which is implied by policy specification. Cfengine’s host classification model is briefly described and the model is compared to related work. 1