A look at cfengine binaries and what they do

cf-promises

This compiles and verifies the promises that have been defined. Basically used to pre-check configurations before you can actually deploy those.  

cf-agent

This is the actual binary that maintains the system resources based on policy files.  

cf-serverd

Only the server can share files with other agent hosts and also receive requests to execute policies. It is not possible to send (push) new information to CFEngine from outside.

cf-execd

This is the scheduling daemon (which can either supplement or replace cron). It works as a wrapper, executing and collecting the output of cf-agent and E-mailing it to system account. 

cf-runagent

This is a helper program that can talk to cf-serverd and request that it execute cf-agent with its existing policy. It can thus be used to simulate a push of changes to CFEngine hosts, if their policy includes that they check for updates. 

cf-report

Generates summary and other reports in a variety of formats for export or integration with other systems. 

cf-know

This agent can generate an ISO standard Topic Map from a number of promises about system knowledge. It is used for rendering documentation as a `semantic web'.