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Introduction

For over twenty years the configuration of CSE's servers and lab computers has been managed by a home-grown product called conform. conform micromanaged the entire filesystem of each computer and handled the copying in of all configuration files, binaries, scripts, libraries, data files, etc, from a central repository called "the conformary". Very powerful, but also very labour intensive and very limiting. This is the Old World.

The New World grew out a HoS-supported project to move as much CSE infrastructure as possible out of CSE's K17 data centre and into "the cloud", specifically Amazon's AWS. Early on, a decision was made that conform would be left behind and that all new servers and hosts set up in AWS would be managed some other way. This other way ended up being -- after a review of configuration management tools -- a split between cfengine and Debian's apt family of package manager utilities (apt, dpkg, apt-get, apt-file, etc.) In this split, apt handles all Debian package management (mainly installs and updates) and cfengine handles the rest, mostly configuration files.

Debian was chosen because CSE's existing teaching platform was heavily based on Debian and the principle of least surprise was applied.

A bit more specifically, each New World host's filesystem is handled thusly:

Path	Handled by
/etc	Jointly managed by apt which mostly provides default versions of configuration files, and cfengine which installs CSE-specific versions of configuration files
/usr/local/extrafiles /usr/local/extrapackages /usr/local/debpkgs_lists	cfengine
/proc /sys /dev	The kernel
/tmp /var	Whatever processes are running on the host
Everything else	apt

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