I've been working up a cfengine-based setup to manage a new server infrastructure. This will be my third cfengine-based infrastructure, so I should have learned enough to make a cleaner, tighter configuration. Unfortunately I'm still finding cfengine to be too damned awkward.

So, I'd like to put together a list of alternatives to cfengine. I'll add them to this page, and hopefully add on notes and reviews as I learn more. If you have experience with these or others, please add a comment.

• Puppet seems to be an up and comer. It looks to be designed to be much more extensible than cfengine is. It also lets you make sure each host only sees its own configuration, which is one of my peeves about cfengine. It's my leading candidate at the moment.

I would call cfengine a configuration management tool. I just can't get into graphical and web-based tools for managing servers, I much prefer having a set of configuration files that I can check into version control. Once I've got a decent configuration set for an infrastructure, setting up, updating, or changing the role of a machine is a simple matter of tweaking the configuration files and running a command.

I find cfengine to be a bit awkward, it's configuration system suffers from being an academic research project. But so far I haven't found anything better.