Configuration and change management with Bcfg2

The Dean

© david harding, Fotolia

© david harding, Fotolia

Article from Issue 101/2009
Author(s): , Author(s):

The powerful Bcfg2 provides a sophisticated environment for centralized configuration management.

The experts at the department of mathematics and computer science at the Argonne National Laboratory [1] were so unhappy about having to configure their numerous computer systems manually that they started an internal research project, dubbed Bcfg2 [2], that they later released under the BSD license.

Getting Started

Bcfg2 provides a sophisticated system for describing and deploying complete client configurations. This flexible tool uses a comprehensive XML format to describe the configurations, and RPC to communicate with the clients.

Experts will find Bcfg2 easy to extend, but the learning curve is steep – the program uses a powerful, abstract approach.

[...]

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