CFEngine – Installing on Debian GNU/Linux

In this post we’ll install CFEngine on a Debian system. Debian make is really simple to install any packages, so let’s follow the “standard” package installation procedure (I’ll assume that apt is correctly setup on your system ! If you have troubles with it, let me know, I’ll write a post on this topic).

If you don’t know what is CFEngine, you might be interested in reading the first part of this series about CFEngine.

Updating package information

host:~# apt-get update
Get: 1 http://ftp2.fr.debian.org testing Release.gpg [189B]
Hit http://ftp2.fr.debian.org testing Release
Hit http://ftp2.fr.debian.org testing/main Packages/DiffIndex
Hit http://ftp2.fr.debian.org testing/contrib Packages/DiffIndex
Fetched 1B in 2s (0B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
host:~#

This will update the cache holding package information.

Finding appropriate packages

Now that the cache is updated, let’s find what package we need :

host:~# apt-cache search cfengine
cfengine2 - Tool for configuring and maintaining network machines
cfengine2-doc - HTML and Info documentation for cfengine2
dpsyco-cfengine - Automate applying of cfengine configs
emacs-goodies-el - Miscellaneous add-ons for Emacs
pkgsync - automated package list synchronization
host:~#

We’ll only need cfengine2 and cfengine2-doc for now.

Installing those packages

host:~# apt-get install cfengine2 cfengine2-doc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed
cfengine2 cfengine2-doc
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 77 not upgraded.
Need to get 1569kB of archives.
After unpacking 3994kB of additional disk space will be used.
[...]

When asked if you want to run cfservd at boot time, decline. cfservd is a fileserver which can be use to distribute config files to the targeted hosts. We won’t need it now.

When asked to run cfexecd at boot time, decline. cfexecd is a daemon which can automatically trigger cfengine. We’ll rely on cron for this job.

When asked if you want to run cfenvd at boot time, accept. cfenvd gathers statistics about your machine behaviour, and can help to guess what is a “normal” state. We’ll see more about it later.

The installation then finishes.

Thanks to Debian packaging system, this is a very simple task.

2 thoughts on “CFEngine – Installing on Debian GNU/Linux”

  1. hai there,i’m hopping if there are any good example of codes or script to setup the Cfengine from the basics.

    i’m new to this automation things,any help would be appreciated.

    i’m using Debian,on Intel processor,

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