Unlock the power of CFEngine with expert insights and get your burning policy questions.
Cody, Craig and Nick discuss and answer CFEngine policy questions submitted by users.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Questions These are the questions and policy used during the episode but each question has a separate blog post that goes into more detail.
I was chatting with someone recently about some security maintenance tasks and they were bemoaning that some software updates had turned into a yack shaving1. Updating this required updating that, required updating that on N hosts of varying platforms and flavors. So, they asked me how could they avoid updating a specific package and naturally I said, let’s just prototype some policy.
The incipiency of said yak shaving was updating packages via apt, Debian flavored systems default package manager.
Tired of hand crafting policy and arguing with people about spacing and alignment? Longing for regularity and easier scanning of your policy no matter who wrote it?
Cody, Craig and Nick wrap up the second year of The agent is in with Miek Gieben, CFEngine Community user and author of cffmt, a formatted written in go for CFEngine policy files. Check out the discussion about opinionated formatting, possible future developments and other tooling to improve qualify of life as a CFEngineer.
Have a burning desire to run sshd or another service on your VR headset?
Cody, Craig and Nick do time-boxed live hackathon working on developing CFEngine services promise type support for Termux. Watch Nick and Craig race to implement basic services support before the timer buzzes.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees.
I have stopped using my Linux distro’s package manager, and you should, too. Maybe I should clarify that. I don’t install software with my distro’s package manager any more. I still upgrade my system.
I became influenced by a few different factors. Top among these is something required in certain industries called a change advisory board or committee. This requirement says that changes to production computers have to be reviewed and approved by all stakeholders in that computer’s operations.
Throughout the security holiday calendar, we’ve looked at modules for enforcing security requirements. Writing the policy to achieve these security hardening goals is easy. By learning how, you can write policy (or modules) for any requirements, including those specific to your organization. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at five beginner-level examples to get you started, focusing on the most common resources to manage with CFEngine; files and packages.
In the upcoming release of CFEngine 3.21.0 there is a change in behavior with respect to default permissions of created directories. From 3.21.0 and later directories will be created with read, write, execute permissions only for the file owner. No permissions are granted for group or other.
This change improves the default security posture to make sure that only the user executing CFEngine (typically root) will have access to content in newly created directories.
Do you know how to use every function available in CFEngine?
Join Cody, Craig, Herman to see how Nick uses org-mode, org-roam, and ob-cfengine3 to manage his personal collection of CFEngine Function Examples.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
Notes Live coded examples for the following functions:
What’s autorun?
Autorun is a feature of the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF)1 that simplifies the process of adding and executing new policy.
We have talked about Modular policies with autorun and the Augments before. This time, we dig into autorun a bit deeper to explore some of its current features and look at how to implement your own as we did during The agent is in, Episode 15 - Extending autorun
How can I run my own bundles automatically, like autorun from the MPF (Masterfiles Policy Framework), but with different logic?
Cody Valle (Head of community), Criag Comstock (Digger), Ole Herman Elgesem (Product Manager) and Nick Anderson (Doer of Things) review the existing capabilities and limitations of autorun in the MPF. After reaching the limits offered by the stock framework they explore implementing a custom autorun, for example recursively finding policy files or only including policy files with associated enablement classes.
