Although every effort has been made to make the compilation of cfengine trouble free, you might still encounter some problems where non-standard features are concerned. The differences between systems is still a major headache.
Earlier versions of the GNU/Linux operating system do not have support
for some of the facilities which cfengine uses. In particular, the
ability to use NIS netgroups is absent from earlier versions. During
the installation procedure, the configure script tests for this
possibility and advises you if the facility cannot be used. You can
still use cfengine in this case but netgroups will not be expanded.
Another problem with GNU/Linux concerns a special socket call to the
TCP/IP network interface. This is a command which configures the static
routing table and appears to be absent from all versions of Linux and
newer IRIX versions. There are also problems with NetBSD. These
features are undocumented and will be fixed as soon as they have been
understood! If you are running in verbose mode a warning message is
printed, otherwise cfengine will ignore attempts to set a default route
on the system.
A number of users have experienced a problem using flex and bison in place of lex and yacc. There appears to be a bug in one of these programs which causes cfengine to compile correctly but misinterpret its configuration files, generating an error of the form
cfengine:10:action contains invalid statement
for every line! The cure is to collect the latest versions of flex and bison from your nearest GNU site.
On really old systems, the configure program is not able to guess what kind of system you are working on. This is true of SunOS versions 4.0.* and also of BSD 4.3 systems. In such cases, you might be able to compile cfengine by using the autoconf option `host' to specify the host-type.
configure --host=sparc-sun-sunos4.0
Some other systems which will compile if forced are:
m68k-hp-bsd4.3 ?-?-bsd4.3 romp-ibm-aos ?-?-aos
On some systems, problems arise when using flex. Flex might generate a lexer file lex.yy.c which defines malloc or some other function to be of a type which conflicts with the system definition. If you obtain such a culture crash, edit the lexer file manually and simply delete the offending definitions, then run make again.
As of version 1.4.0 cfengine tries to link in features based on the Berkeley database library `libdb' and the TCP wrappers library `libwrap'. If you want to use these facilities, you will have to collect them and install them before compiling cfengine. Some problems have been experienced with the linux version of TCP wrappers. If you experience compilation problems, the best thing to do is to edit `src/conf.h' after configuration and remove the line beginning `#define HAVE_LIBWRAP'.
Newer solaris systems have ACLs. The ACL features only matured in version 2.5 of solaris however, and there have been some problems with the partial implementation in 2.4. If you obtain error messages about unknown ACL functions, edit the `config.cache' file in the cfengine root directory and set the value:
ac_cv_header_sys_acl_h=${ac_cv_header_sys_acl_h='no'}
If you use the DCE (Distributed computing environment) cfengine will try to compile the ACL extension for DFS. This requires the DCE library to be present on the system on which you are compiling. On some systems it also requires thread libraries to be present. Unfortunately, the autoconf program which generates the Makefiles cannot detect shared libraries, only archive libraries. This means that you need to edit the `config.cache' file to compile in this support. Set the following values:
ac_cv_lib_dce_main=${ac_cv_lib_dce_main='yes'}
ac_cv_lib_dce_main=${ac_cv_lib_thread_main='yes'}
Finally, although the autoconfiguration program appends the same libraries to each executable, the following libraries are required only by the following programs.
cfengine -ldce -lthread -lm cfd -ldb -lpthread
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