Cfengine is a configuration management tool that is widely used to manage networks of Unix systems. It was originally developed at the University of Oslo in 1993. I’ve only been dimly aware of it and assumed it was yet another common system administration tool for Unix. I was surprised to see how it’s described on the Cfengine site:

“About Cfengine: Cfengine, or the configuration engine is an autonomous agent and a middle to high level policy language and agent for building expert systems to administrate and configure large computer networks. Cfengine is designed to be a part of a computer immune system. It is ideal for cluster management and has been adopted for use all over the world in small and huge organizations alike.”

The developers have evolved their approach to use a biologically inspired immunity model and have a recent paper in the Machine Learning Journal.

Related posts: • New ACM journal on Autonomous Adaptive Systems;  • Wooldridge gets 2006 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award;  • Call for nominations for the 2006 SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award;  

Posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 10:36 am in categories [AI, Machine Learning, Agents]. Comments feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site. edit