If you are a beginner to cfengine, you might not be certain exactly how you want to use it. Here are some hints from Dr. Daystrom about how to get things working quickly.
Running cfengine from cron means that it will be run in parallel on your systems. Cfengine on one host does not have to wait for cfengine on another host to complete.
cfd
on all your systems so that cfengine can be executed
remotely, so that you can immediately "push" changes to all your
hosts with cfrun
. Think carefully about whom you wish to give permission to run
cfengine from the net, See Configuring cfd. Set up you
cfd.conf
file accordingly. You can also use this daemon to
grant access rights for remote file copying.
Cfrun polls all your hosts serially and gives you a concatenated indexed list of problems on all hosts. The disadvantage with cfrun is that each host has to wait its turn.
cfd
to the system startup scripts, or to inittab
so that it starts when you boot your system.
cfrun.hosts
file. It does not
matter that some may be master servers and others clients. The locking
mechanisms will protect you from silliness, See Deadlocks and runaway loops. Cfengine will work it out. Cfrun allows you to remotely execute
cfengine on groups of hosts which satisfy a list of cfengine classes.
When you have set up these components, you can sit back and edit the configuration files and watch things being done.