A while back one of my co-workers wanted to set up cfengine for our servers. Now, for the uninitated, cfengine is a system of consolidating configurations for large groups of servers. At first I was highly resistant to cfengine because it was new, I knew nothing about it and the more things in cfengine, the less things I could actually fix. So one day I made her give me as much information on cfengine as possible and teach me everything she knows about it. I can’t think of a more worthwhile way to spend a day. Slowly but surely we’re getting everything moved into cfengine, and everywhere that I can I like to put things under cfengine control. One rad side effect of doing this is that rebuilding a server is pathetically easy. I’m almost done building my first purely cfengine controlled server. The nice thing about it is that I’m not so hot on the partition scheme I chose on this server. But that’s not a problem, even if I want to wipe it out on a whim rebuilding it is seriously a two step process. 1) Install base system 2) run cfengine.

That’s pretty freakin' sweet.