-*- text -*-

CFENGINE version 2
-------------------

Cfengine is a suite of programs for setting up and maintaining BSD and
System-5-like operating system optionally attached to a TCP/IP
network.  You can think of cfengine as a very high level language and
a self-learning software agent---much higher level than Perl or shell:
a single statement can result in many hundreds of operations being
performed on multiple hosts. Cfengine is good at performing a lot of
common system administration tasks, and allows you to build on its
strengths with your own scripts. You can also use it as a netwide
front-end for cron.

The main purpose of cfengine is to allow you to create a single,
central system configuration which will define how every host on your
network should be configured in an intuitive way.  An
interpreter/agent runs on every host on your network and parses the
master file (or file-set); the configuration of each host is checked
against this file and then, if you request it, any deviations from the
defined configuration are fixed automatically.  You do not have to
mention every host specifically by name in order to configure them :
instead you can refer to the properties which distinguish hosts from
one another.  Cfengine uses a flexible system of ``classes'' which
helps you to single out a specific group of hosts with a single
statement.

New features in cfengine 2:

* Program restructuring and rationalization.
* All network connections are now mutually authenticated by 
  public/private key methods, regardless of whether encryption
  is used to make communication private.
* Improved network transfer efficiency.
* Automated anomaly detection.
* Improved reporting and scheduling mechanisms, based on recent
  research.

Cfengine is written mainly by Mark Burgess at Oslo University College
in Norway.

Bug reports to bug-cfengine@gnu.org   (News: gnu.cfengine.bug)
General help to help-cfengine@gnu.org (News: gnu.cfengine.help)

Official web site is at http://www.cfengine.org at Oslo University College.

INSTALLATION
------------

To compile this program, you simply follow the standard GNU configure
rules.  At its simpleist, to build and install CFEngine in /usr/local,
this would be:

configure
make
make install

Please read the detailed information at http://www.cfengine.org

Users with mixed solaris/sparc mileux and new gcc, will need
to compile on older machines with CFLAGS="-g -O2 -mv8"

MB 2002

