Cfengine is a mature system configuration scripting language, ideal for managing a large-scale heterogeneous set of Unix hosts.
I shall briefly describe its philosophy - the principle of convergence - in which a number of fail-safe actions are written, to transform a host to the preferred state.
Examples will include scripted process management, file manipulation, time-randomised checksum and SUID-checking actions.
Once you've been convinced to use it, I'll show how you can deploy it for both routine and ad-hoc invocation.
Finally we will look into the near future of Cfengine development.
$Id: AStribblehill.html 555 2006-09-27 14:04:22Z ray $