Speaker
Mr
Colin Morey
(Manchester University)
Description
Cfengine is a middle to high level policy language and autonomous agent for
building expert systems to administrate and configure large computer clusters. It is
ideal for large-scale cluster management and is highly portable across varying
computer platforms, allowing the management of multiple architectures and node types
within the same farm.
As well as being a highly capable configuration manager, Cfengine can also augment a
network based service manager by providing an alerting mechanism which can monitor
the system for abnormal behaviour, eg. watching and maintaining the permissions on
files and directories, to monitoring available file-system space.
A number of sites within the GridPP collaboration and across the wider EGEE project
are using Cfengine for the deployment and maintenance of their clusters and LCG/gLite
middle-ware installations. This paper will collect together the experiences of these
sites with both the initial setup and the ongoing maintenance of their Cfengine
installations. This paper will also discuss some of the common
implementation scenarios that may be encountered. This paper will also provide some
solutions to common issues that the various sites have faced.
Primary author
Mr
Colin Morey
(Manchester University)
