The only problem I ever had with cfengine is the documentation was
never all that great but it is stable and scales well.
That being said puppet is not perfect many of the stock recipes for it
you find on the web don't scale well and to get it to scale you really
need to be a ruby programer. My other issue with puppet is it doesn't
provide you with a great amount of control over the timing of the
deployment of changes unless you go to significant lengths.
Essentially its good for a "Agile development model" environment which
is popular with many web companies; however its a nightmare for
mission critical 24x7x365 environments which require changes to be
scheduled in advance.

These days I'm using Spacewalk for most of what I would have used
cfengine or puppet for in the past the only thing that it doesn't do
out of the box is make sure that particular services are running or
not running at boot, but there are a myriad of other simple ways to do
that which require very little work, and if I really wanted to I could
get spacewalk to do that as well via the soap APIs.


On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Graham Allan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 2/21/2013 4:13 PM, Natxo Asenjo wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 9:38 PM, Graham Allan <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Also cfengine, though that seems to be getting less fashionable... We
>>> still use it, no compelling reasons to change so far!
>>
>>
>> we take our decisions based on functionality, not fashion.
>>
>> Cfengine is just fine. Good performance, little dependencies, good
>> security record (not unimportant for your infrastructure management
>> tool and oh what a start of the year for ruby it was), and it has in
>> place editing instead of requiring you to use yet another tool
>> (augeas).
>>
>> But puppet/chef are good products too, just not good enough to justify
>> a downgrade from the better one ;-)
>
>
> Totally agree, I just meant that puppet does have more mindshare these days
> and you'll probably find more people familiar with it. We have used cfengine
> for 10+ years, not that we haven't discovered flaws over time but I'm
> certainly very happy with it and see no reason to change. We have had
> student sysadmins come in, have to learn cfengine, they also look at puppet,
> and comment that cfengine was a good choice.
>
> Just as we here still write most of our support scripts etc in perl, that is
> also unfashionable now, doesn't mean it's not the best tool for the job (fx:
> throws bomb and runs away... :-)
>
> Graham