Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Configuring a System
Using Distributed Systems Administration Utilities
Chapter 3148
configuration synchronization operations. The master cfservd is
responsible for authenticating remote clients using a
public/private key exchange mechanism and optionally
encrypting the files that are transferred to the managed clients.
— cfservd can optionally run on each managed client in order to
process cfrun requests. cfrun allows the administrator to push
changes to the managed clients instead of waiting for the clients
to synchronize using some client-defined time interval. The
cfrun command must be initiated from the master configuration
server. It contacts each managed client listed in the cfrun.hosts
files and connects to the managed client’s cfservd asking it to
invoke cfagent to perform the synchronization work.
cfservd is configured using cfservd.conf and started using
/sbin/init.d/cfservd.
• cfexecd -- cfexecd is a scheduling and reporting tool. If the
administrator uses cron to perform synchronization runs at fixed
intervals, cfexecd is the command placed in to the crontab file in
order to wrap the invocation of cfagent. It stores the output of the
cfagent run in the outputs directory (see cfagent.conf for details)
and optionally sends email.
cfexecd has it’s own cron-like features based on cfengine’s time
classes. The administrator can choose to run cfexed in daemon mode
and use it to invoke cfagent at defined intervals instead of cron. The
default is to invoke cfagent every hour. When getting started with
cfengine, it is simplest to start out using cron.
• cfrun -- the cfrun command contacts the managed clients asking
each to perform an immediate synchronization run. Specifically, it
connects to the optional cfservd on each managed client which in
turn launches cfagent.