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Implementing "single-copy nirvana" in cfengine3

August 23, 2010
Here is a sample implementation in cfengine3 of the technique described in the cfengine wiki as "Singlecopy Nirvana" for cfengine2. Cfengine3 makes the technique more powerful by allowing modularization, so that you can specify both the suffixes to try, and the files to copy using those suffixes, as variables. Also, cf3's automatic list expansion allows us to write a single copy statement that will be automatically expanded into all the different values to try.

Installing cfengine on Windows 7 under cygwin

August 23, 2010

Update (2011/09/05): Updated the instructions for cfengine 3.2.0, cygwin 1.7.9, and tested them on a clean cygwin install.

Installing the cfengine community edition under Windows (the commercial version includes native Windows support) is fairly easy under cygwin, you just need to have the appropriate dependencies installed. Here’s how I did it.

Versions  

  • cfengine: 3.2.0
  • Windows 7 Enterprise SP1/64bit
  • cygwin: 1.7.9-1

Additional cygwin packages needed 

To install these, run cygwin’s setup.exe, search for each packages in turn, and install them. Make sure you agree to install any additional packages that are listed as dependencies (setup.exe will ask you about it).