FreeBSD User - New to cfEngine

[Lewis De Payne]

Hello everyone - This will be my first time deploying cfEngine, to help manage a HIPAA-Compliant FreeBSD medical network. While I have been using FreeBSD (as a server OS for all my commercial enterprises) since 1998, this will be my first time deploying and configuring cfEngine. I would really enjoy hearing from other FreeBSD users on here, especially if you're willing to share some hints and/or FreeBSD-specific recipes that you've come up with. Right now, I'm a cfEngine neophyte, and there doesn't seem to be much FreeBSD-related cfEngine information out there (the last major articles being from 2012). Please feel free to jump into this thread!

[Steven Kreuzer]

Glad to see more FreeBSD users are joining this list. Welcome to a very small

club :) I have been running CFEngine 3 on FreeBSD since about 2012 after making

the somewhat painful transition from CFEngine 2.

One thing to keep in mind is that FreeBSD is not a 'supported' platform which

means that Northern Tech (the company behind CFEngine) does not do any testing

or verification on this platform. As a result some features just don't work on

FreeBSD (user promises for example) and certain bugs will get fixed on supported

platforms but will still be an issue on FreeBSD which can lead to some surprises

in production.

One suggestion I have would be to install cfengine from ports

(sysutils/cfengine3) Its actively maintained by 3 different FreeBSD developers

(one of them being me) and we add a lot of patches to the freebsd port to

address various issues we find. (Those patches also get sent back upstream but

it usually takes a while for them to get accepted back into cfengine core)

FreeBSD's popularity has started to grow in recent years as FreeBSD seems to be

attracting more and more interest from companies who are looking to migrate off

Solaris as well as people who are not interested in using systemd on Linux. I am

hoping that these events may get Northern Tech to reconsider adding FreeBSD as a

supported platform but I assume that until they have an enterprise customer

running FreeBSD they wont really have an incentive to do so.

However, don't let any of this scare you away from cfengine. While it is a

little rough around the edges on FreeBSD, I still think its one of the more

robust configuration management systems available, especially if you are running

on bare metal.

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 10:20 AM, Lewis De Payne <lew....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello everyone - This will be my first time deploying cfEngine, to help manage a HIPAA-Compliant FreeBSD medical network.  While I have been using FreeBSD (as a server OS for all my commercial enterprises) since 1998, this will be my first time deploying and configuring cfEngine.  I would really enjoy hearing from other FreeBSD users on here, especially if you're willing to share some hints and/or FreeBSD-specific recipes that you've come up with.  Right now, I'm a cfEngine neophyte, and there doesn't seem to be much FreeBSD-related cfEngine information out there (the last major articles being from 2012).  Please feel free to jump into this thread!

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[Nick Anderson]

Me too, but I want enterprise packages to install on my FreeNAS

[Florian Heigl]

Am Donnerstag, 3. August 2017 23:39:43 UTC+2 schrieb Steven Kreuzer:

Glad to see more FreeBSD users are joining this list. Welcome to a very small

club :) I have been running CFEngine 3 on FreeBSD since about 2012 after making

the somewhat painful transition from CFEngine 2.

adding myself, though it's an off-and-on thing right now, partly due to the nature of "official" support.

 

FreeBSD's popularity has started to grow in recent years as FreeBSD seems to be

attracting more and more interest from companies who are looking to migrate off

Solaris as well as people who are not interested in using systemd on Linux. I am

hoping that these events may get Northern Tech to reconsider adding FreeBSD as a

supported platform but I assume that until they have an enterprise customer

running FreeBSD they wont really have an incentive to do so.

It looks sensible on the commercial end, on first glance.

IMHO a config management system needs to cover its basics to be viable.

Any OS that has a few large installs somewhere should be supported. 

There are other kinds of SW dev where you don't need broad coverage

out of the box - but in *configuration management* lack of OS support

or testing on certain OS is not serious territory.

Being late on systemd support here or PKG support there, 

dropping and adding back OS from supported list are all great ways to

waste a lot of time re-learning what you knew and look undependable.

Which is just not right, considering how well CFEngine does work.

If it helps, print this and hammer it on someone's desk.

Florian