How often should your configuration management system verify the integrity of your system? The default choices we've made by CFEngine are the results of almost 20 years of research into this area. Below you will find ten issues and references that explain why these choices are underpinned by the science. These ten things really all amount to the same thing: if you are playing ping-pong against the adversary of change, you need to be as quick on your feet as your opponent -- and faster.

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NEW! CFEngine 3 Nova Evaluation Program

by Geir Nygård - March 19, 2012

CFEngine is happy to see increased demand for our software, both the Open Source version, CFEngine Community, and the Enterprise Software version, CFEngine 3 Nova. We recently moved the CFEngine Community source code to GitHub and plan to use that platform to interact more closely with the general community (watch this space for hot topics to come!).

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CFEngine @ USENIX LISA 2011

by the editor - December 13, 2011

The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization [www.usenix.org], is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional centre for the field of the system administration for most of that time. LISA is a unique haven for practitioners in the field, but it was also the place where modern theory emerged, driven largely by the efforts of a small group of individuals known as the ABC of system administration: Anderson, Burgess, Couch. CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess has been attending LISA since 1997.

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The Third Wave of human society is an age where knowledge and information drive prosperity. Parallel to the changes that pushed humanity through major industrialization in manufacturing are developments happening in IT management today, some thirty years behind the manufacturing industry. CFEngine and its users have been a primus motor for these changes -- helping to transform old techniques into a knowledge-based approach to IT -- and we are celebrating this new chapter with the announcement of CFEngines Nova and Constellation.

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