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Nick Anderson

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 3 - What's new in 3.18?

Come see the new hotness in the latest LTS series, 3.18! Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) take a tour of 3.18.0, the first release in the latest LTS series. Join them in exploring dark mode, compliance reports, host specific data via Mission Portals CMDB, manually triggered agent runs, report collections, and CFEngine Build. 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
July 29, 2021

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 2 - Community user demo with Jeff Carlson

Interested writing CFEngine policy faster? Jeff (CFEngine Community user) demonstrates his YASnippet library for CFEngine to make writing CFEngine policy significantly faster. 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
June 25, 2021

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 1 - Debugging with CFEngine policy analyzer

Interested in seeing promise results (KEPT, REPAIRED, NOTKEPT) overlaid on top of the policy itself? Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) kick off the new series, “The agent is in” and take a look at the policy analyzer in CFEngine Enterprise Mission Portal. 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
May 27, 2021

CFEngine 3.12.4-2 released

Today we released 3.12.4-2. Shortly after releasing 3.12.4-1, we identified a permissions problem that prevents 3.12.4-1 from contributing data to a 3.15 hub setup for federated reporting; this release fixes that permission issue. As always, you can find Enterprise packages on our Enterprise downloads page and Community packages can be found in our public repositories and on our Community downloads page. Additionally, please note, cf-remote can be used to install our released Enterprise or Community packages.

Posted by Nick Anderson
April 6, 2020

Welcoming Dimitrios Apostolou as a CFEngine Champion

As we enter 2020 and reflect on the various contributions the project has received we want to take a moment to recognize one of the more prolific contributors as a CFEngine Champion. It’s my honor to announce and welcome Dimitrios Apostolou as the latest CFEngine Champion. At the time of this writing, he is the fourth most prolific committer in cfengine/core with 1101 commits. 2584 Mikhail Gusarov 2045 Mark Burgess 1430 Sigurd Teigen 1101 Dimitrios Apostolou 825 Kristian Amlie Notably, as an employee of CFEngine AS and Northern.tech AS Dimitrios was responsible for introducing Protocol 2 (TLS), greatly improving the performance of cf-serverd, and refactoring the policy evaluation to improve the speed of iteration over large and complex lists and data structures. As a community member, Dimitrios worked in his spare time to open source cf-monitord bringing the ability to write custom measurement promises to the Community edition. Thank you, Jimis. You have significantly enhanced the CFEngine community through your individual efforts. Know someone that has significantly enhanced CFEngine through their contributions to the project itself or via their engagement with the community? Nominate them!

Posted by Nick Anderson
February 14, 2020

CFEngine 3.12.3-2 and 3.15.0-2 released

We recently released new builds for our Enterprise and Community packages. This release fixes an issue causing Enterprise Hub packages to fail upgrade in some cases. As part of this release, we also made changes to package names to ensure consistent naming that also includes the target platform in the filename. As always, you can find Enterprise packages on our Enterprise downloads page and Community packages can be found in our public repositories and on our Community downloads page.

Posted by Nick Anderson
February 7, 2020

Measuring values extracted from a running log

Recently I wanted to start measuring the length of time it took for PostgreSQL to acquire a lock so that I could keep an eye on how it changes over time. My PostgreSQL logs contain entries like the following that record the amount of time in ms it took to acquire a lock. 2019-06-11 18:49:39 GMT LOG: process 10427 acquired AccessShareLock on relation 17949 of database 16384 after 1118.396 ms at character 269 Measurement promises store and track values. Values can be sampled from either a pipe (command output) or a file as defined by the promises stream_type. Values are stored according to the promises history_type. When a measured value is not expected to change frequently a history_type of scalar or static will result in the measurement being sampled less frequently and the single value with compressed statistics will be stored. A history_type of log results in the measured value being logged as an infinite time-series in $(sys.statedir)/<PromiseHandle>_measure.log. A history_type of weekly results in the storing of a two-dimensional time average over a weekly period. Measurements with history_type of weekly are automatically graphed in Mission Portal if they are collected.

Posted by Nick Anderson
August 13, 2019

CFEngine 3.12.2-3, 3.14.0-2 released (mitigating PostgreSQL CVE-2019-10164)

On [2019-07-29 Mon] we released new builds of our Enterprise Hub packages for 3.12.2 and 3.14.0. This release addresses CVE-2019-10164. PostgreSQL versions 10.x before 10.9 and versions 11.x before 11.4 are vulnerable to a stack-based buffer overflow. Any authenticated user can overflow a stack-based buffer by changing the user’s own password to a purpose-crafted value. This often suffices to execute arbitrary code as the PostgreSQL operating system account. CFEngine Enterprise LTS versions 3.12.0, 3.12.1, 3.12.2-1, 3.12.2-2, and non-LTS version 3.14.0 vendor PostgreSQL versions affected by this vulnerability. In the default configuration as access to root or cfpostgres local users must be achieved first.

Posted by Nick Anderson
August 6, 2019

Writing custom service_methods

This post has been re-published with permission. CFEngine provides the services promise type to manage the state of a given service. services type promises are an abstraction of agent bundles, they can be used to declare the desired state for a collection of things identified by a name. Most commonly services type promises are used to manage standard operating system services though they can be used for abstracting other logical states. By default, bundle agent standard_services is used for the service_method in promises that specify no specific service_method.

Posted by Nick Anderson
June 17, 2019

How can I execute a command that uses command substitution in CFEngine?

This was originally published here, it has been re-published with permission. How can I execute a command that uses command substitution in CFEngine? On the console I might execute something like this: Listing 1: Example command substitution touch /tmp/file-$(date --iso-8601) ls /tmp/file-* /tmp/file-2019-03-08 I recommend not executing commands using substitution. Instead, prepare all that you need up front. Get the result of the data command and put it into a CFEngine variable, then use the CFEngine variable directly.

Posted by Nick Anderson
May 13, 2019