cfengine Questionnaire

Please help me with my research on automatic system admin by filling out this questionnaire. Even if you only return this to say that you are using cfengine (and which version) please do so. This will be a big help to me and hopefully you will benefit from the returns in the future. The results will influence the direction of my research in the future, whether that means further developing cfengine or in creating complementary software. Questions which you do not answer, I will assume you have no strong feelings about. Mail the results to Mark Burgess. It does not matter if several people from the same company reply. Please indicate whether I can quote specific comments in research work or whether you would prefer the results to be kept confidential.

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1. Are you using cfengine? If not, are you interested in using it? What are your reasons? If so, what version of cfengine are you using?
2. Approximately how many hosts does your cfengine configuration cover? What OSes?
3. Have you used any other system administration tools (e.g. Tivoli, Openview, Solstice?) If so, in what way were these tools good or bad compared to cfengine?
   • ease of configuration
   • power of expression
   • limitations
   • efficiency
   • security
4. How would rate on a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is good) the following features of cfengine
   • Central configuration file
   • Classes
   • Pull rather than push in copying
   • Convergence to a healthy state?
   • Mount model
   • Its basic functionality
   • Its reliabilty
   • The idea of feedback through classes
   • Anything else (please specify)
5. Do you feel that cfengine is missing any important/pressing features? If so please mention these.
6. Do you use cfengine mainly to warn about problems or to fix them automatically?
7. Do you think that it is desirable to minimize the amount of cfengine output (faults, etc) which is sent to the administrator? Or would you prefer to see more?
8. Briefly, what kind of network model do you have? - Firewall. Would you use cfengine on the firewall? - Central file server with NFS clients (other file systems) - Many distributed fileservers.
9. Do you use cfengine for garbage collection? i.e. file and process tidying. If so, what kind of policy do you use to decide which types of file should be deleted?
10. Do you run NT? If so would you like to have the same kind of administrative model there, or is the domain server administration model adequate? How do you deal with garbage collection in NT?
11. Do you feel that cfengine saves you time in performing routine tasks?
12. Does cfengine simplify communication of system policy between cooperating administrators, by having a single configuration file(set) which is self-documenting?

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Updated: $Date: 2001/07/20 07:06:26 $ $Author: brett $