cfagent (8) Linux Manual Page
cfagent – system configuration agent
Synopsis
/usr/local/sbin/cfagent [options]
Description
cfengine is a language based system specifically designed for testing and configuring unix-like systems attached to a TCP/IP network. You can think of cfengine as a very high level language — much higher level than Perl or shell. A single statement can result in many hundreds of links being created, or the permissions of many hundreds of files being set. The idea of cfengine is to create a single file or set of configuration files which will describe the setup of every host on your network.
cfagent runs on every host and parses one file (or file-set), the configuration of the host is checked against this file and, if desired, any deviations are fixed. cfagent reads a configuration file called cfengine.conf in a directory pointed to by the environment variable CFINPUTS. cfagent performs host integrity and security checks as well as installing and repairing system configuration.
Command Line Options
- -a (–sysadm)
- Print only the name of the system administrator then quit.
- -b (–force-net-copy)
- Forces net copy even if remote server is localhost
- -c (–no-check-files)
- Do not check access rights on file systems
- -C (–no-check-mounts)
- Check mount points for consistency. If this option is set then directories which lie in the ”mount point“ area are checked to see whether there is anything mounted on them.
- -d (–debug)
- Enable debugging output. (parsing -d1,run, -d2, lite -d3)
- -D (–define)
- Define a compound class symbol of the form alpha.beta.gamma.
- -e (–no-edits)
- Suppress file editing.
- -E (–enforce-links)
- Globally force links to be created where plain files or links already exist. You have to use this in interactive mode and answer a yes/no query before cfagent will run like this.
- -f (–file)
- Parse filename after this switch. By default cfagent looks for a file called cfengine.conf in the current directory.
- -h (–help )
- Help information. Display version banner and options summary.
- -H (–no-hard-classes)
- Prevents cfagent from generating any internal class name information. Can be used for emulation purposes.
- -i (–no-ifconfig)
- Do not attempt to configure the local area network interface.
- -I (–inform)
- Switches on the inform output level, whereby cfagent reports everything it changes..
- -k (–no-copy)
- Do not copy/image any files.
- -K (–no-lock)
- Ignore locks when running.
- -l (–traverse-links)
- Normally cfagent does not follow symbolic links when recursively parsing directories. This option will force it to do so.
- -L (–delete-stale-links)
- Delete links which do not point to existing files (except in user home directories, which are not touched).
- -m (–no-mount)
- Do not attempt to mount file systems or edit the filesystem table.
- -M (–no-modules)
- Ignore modules in actionsequence.
- -n (–recon,–dry-run,–just-print)
- No action. Only print what has to be done without actually doing it.
- -N (–negate,–undefine)
- Cancel a set of classes, or undefine (set value to false) a compound class of the form alpha.beta.gamma.
- -p (–parse-only)
- Parse file and then stop. Used for checking the syntax of a program.
- -P (–no-processes)
- Do not test the existence of processes, signal processes or optionally restart them.
- -q (–no-splay)
- Switch off host splaying (sleeping).
- -s (–no-commands)
- Do not execute scripts or shell commands.
- -S (–silent)
- Silence run time warnings.
- -t (–no-tidy)
- Do not tidy file systems.
- -u (–use-env)
- Causes cfagent to generate an environment variable CFALLCLASSES which can be read by child processes (scripts). This variable contains a summary of all the currently defined classes at any given time. This option causes some system 5 systems to generate a Bus Error or segmentation fault.
- -U (–underscore-classes)
- When this option is set, cfagent adds an underscore to the beginning of all hard system classes (like _sun4, _linux etc.) This can be used to avoid naming conflicts if you are so injudicious as to name a host by the name of a hard class. Other classes are not affected.
- -v (–verbose)
- Verbose mode. Prints detailed information about actions and state.
- -V (–version)
- Print only the version string and then quit.
- -x (–no-preconf)
- Do not execute the cf.preconf net configuration file.
- -X (–no-links)
- Do not execute the links section of a program.
- -w (–no-warn,–quiet)
- Do not print warning messages.
Author
Mark Burgess, Oslo University College