With more and more services using SSL keeping track of the certificates in use across a global infrastructure can be challenging. The inventory reporting features in CFEngine Enterprise can be useful in identifying services using SSL as well as when their certificates will expire. cf-monitord provides lists of ports that are listening. We can use openssl to connect to each listening port and if successful we can extract the certificate information for inventory. We won’t be able to find ALL certificates like this. This policy only covers up-front SSL/TLS. From Serverfault:
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.11.0 Beta (non-LTS) is now ready. Thanks to everyone for all of the contributions! Please test extensively and submit bug reports. 3.11.x introduces some new features and deprecates some underutilized functionality. Please note that 3.11.0 will be a non-LTS release, which means that it will be maintained only for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but Enterprise packages will be available). Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see:
We’re happy to announce maintenance releases for both supported CFEngine release branches today! Being maintenance (aka patch) releases, the goal is to increase stability and reliability for CFEngine users and enable a safe upgrade-path. As such, the releases primarily include bugfixes and low-risk changes that do not impact the compatibility between previous patch releases. Looking at the CFEngine release schedule, we can see that
3.7 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until July 17th 2018 3.9 non-LTS is no longer maintained 3.10 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until December 27th 2019 If you are planning to contribute features to the next feature release (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by early-April in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.11. If you are planning to contribute fixes to 3.10 LTS please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by early-May in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.10.2 LTS.
Last week we attended Config Management Camp in Gent Belgium.
How did automation start? In the beginning Mark split light from dark…
There were 7 talks in the CFEngine devroom. Christian Linden kicked things off with his presentation “Get set for getting work done by CFEngine”. He covered the basics of what you need to know when getting started with CFEngine as well as some tips to help in debugging policies. After Christians Kickoff I talked about “Testing CFEngine Policy”. Why you should test, currently available testing frameworks, how to get started writing tests that produce TAP and or JUnit output and finally how to expand CFEngines test coverage while contributing to examples in the documentation. Martin Simons wrapped up the first day with his talk “CFEngine Hero of IoT”. Martin brought a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian told us how he is using it to implement a motion-activated security system built with commodity hardware at home and then demonstrated how CFEngine can easily manage it and deployed a tomcat application. The main topic of conversation on Tuesday was data. How to separate it from policy, how to make use of external data, and how it can make your life easier in SURFsara. Bas van der Vlies started us off with his talk “How to use the augments file (def.json)”. He showed how he defined a host specific data file that let him easily override default values for a specific service/bundle. He discussed how this has had great benefits for non CFEngine users in his environment, allowing them to easily identify which service/bundles are activated for a host and exceptions that each host is overriding. Next Jurica Borozan talked about “Merging Technologies, ideas on using CFEngine with cloud and container technologies”. He discussed how his tag based classification system enabled host specific policies to be delivered and the varying ways that this common model could be applied to physical systems, docker containers, and cloud hosts leveraging the features available in each technology stack. He finished up by demonstrating his policy that managed maintaining a specific number of AWS instances for a given image and how a simple change in his data source (a json file) resulted in nodes being provisioned or destroyed within 5 minutes. Neil Watson gave a short remote talk “CFEngine Simplified with EFL”. He discussed the design philosophy of EFL and how you can leverage the framework to get things accomplished with CFEngine without having to know any policy. I wrapped up talks with a short presentation on “The Masterfiles policy Framework: A short history and future direction”. I presented the lineage of the current policy framework, how we got to where we are today and how data (the augments file def.json) is very much at the core of how we expect to improve usability and ease future policy framework upgrades without having to edit policy. Special thanks to Christian, Martin, Bas, and Neil for sharing your thoughts and presentations. We look forward to seeing everyone again next year!
The notes from the Q4 2016 meeting can be found in the github repository.
This meeting marks 2 years for the Community Advisory Board. As a reminder the current board members include:
Bas van der Vlies Jonathan Clarke Mike Svoboda Ted Zlatanov Neil Watson Eystein Stenberg Nick Anderson The general consensus was that the meetings have been valuable and we should continue the efforts. We have decided to pilot having the next advisory board meeting in #cfengine instead of #cfengine-cab in order to increase community awareness and get additional input from other users with different perspectives.
This interview was conducted by Aleksey Tsalolikhin / 3 Aug 2016 Q: What can you tell our readers about yourself? How did you start using CFEngine? A: I am a Spanish sysadmin living and working in The Netherlands (Dutch spouse). All round (multidisciplinary) sysadmin, with a focus on automation, bootstrapping infrastructures, high availability, disaster recovery, storage. I started using CFEngine about 8/9 years ago (or was it 10?). Back in the day I was the only admin doing Linux at our company, and the Linux infrastructure was growing every week and it was getting impossible to manage everything by hand. So CFEngine to the rescue. I found the tutorials on the debian-administration.org site, looking at the publication dates, it must have been 10 years ago, time flies) and it seemed quite doable. Later I came across the Campi/Bauer book: Automating Linux and Unix System Administration and re-implemented quite a bit of stuff with their tips, not only CFEngine but also FAI/Kickstart. Q: Could you give us an example of something you’ve automated with CFEngine that stands out as having made your life easier, helps you to sleep better at night, or has really made a difference for the business? A: Stuff I’ve used CFEngine for: - disabling/enabling services; - configuration mail routing; - seLinux; - iptables; - yum/apt repositories; - installation software; - configuration syslogd/journald/logstash forwarders for ELK; - distribution of sysadmin scripts/configuration files/motd’s; - distribution known_hosts files for ssh clients; - distribution and configuration of monitoring software (nagios: nrpe/snmpd); - configuration ntpd/chronyd; Anything that needs doing basically. We have a number of host types (apache2, tftpd, mysqld, java application servers, etc). Our Linux infra is coupled to a freeipa environment with the automember plugin, so if the host is called tftp\* (where \* is ‘whatever’ ) then that host will be member of an LDAP hostgroup, which in FreeIPA gets populated as a netgroup as well. We can use those netgroups to automatically define classes in CFEngine and those classes are coupled to actions (install apache2, configure it according to x, y, z, etc.). My colleagues install the OS using PXE and the only thing they need to do once the installation is done is give the host a name (part of joining the FreeIPA domain). The rest gets done automatically. So this is about it in a nutshell. Without CFEngine this company would not have the Linux infrastructure it now has and I would not have had time to accomplish many other projects (I became much more efficient, so I got assigned to many more projects). Q: You said you have about 150 Linux nodes in your network. How many are still on cf2 and how many are on cf3? A: cf2: 70%, cf3 the rest (growing). Q: When we corresponded earlier, you said you “left the old cf2 environment alone (it basically never dies and does not need new modifications)”. What led you to start using cf3? A: Lack of support for cf2. We use CentOS and with CentOS 7 the cf2 binaries were a bit long in the tooth. Q: What’s the biggest advantage of cf3 over cf2 for you? A: cf3 is more consistent in its syntax. Plus the standard library has a lot of scaffolding already set up for us (services, for instance). The packages method is much nicer as well. Q: What are you most proud of about your setup? A: Difficult to say, in the end this is just a tool. It’s nice to see things work the way they are supposed to, but that is our work. Q: What do you enjoy most about the CFEngine community? A: Very fast (good) answers and advice for alternative solutions to the issues one posts to the mailing list. Nice, polite, civil, discussions. All communities should be like this. Q: Any advice for the CFEngine 2 users out there? a: Even though cf2 is an excellent tool, the fact that it is no longer supported means that you will be on your own if something happens to your setup. This could be an issue. if you have a very stable and static environment where cf2 just works, leave that alone and set a new cf3 environment next to it. Sooner or later you will get a system where cf2 will not run without much effort, and at that time you will have a problem. Q: Anything else you’d like to share with the CFEngine community? A: I learnt a lot using your tutorial and Brian Bennett’s (@bahamat) posts, specially the cf-primer: from zero to hero. Those are the hands on tutorials that the community needs. CFEngine has a reputation for being hard, but it’s not really true. Aleksey Tsalolikhin is a CFEngine consultant and trainer at Vertical Sysadmin.
A few months ago I posted a link on the help list to the CFEngine layer for spacemacs. Since then I have learned there are a few other org-mode users so I wanted to share how I got cfengine3 src blocks execution working. I added the following to my dotspacemacs/user-init.
(defcustom org-babel-cfengine3-command "/var/cfengine/bin/cf-agent" "Name of command to use for executing CFEngine policy.") (defvar org-babel-cfengine3-command-options "--no-lock" "Option string that should be passed to the agent. Note that --file will be appended to the options.") (defvar org-babel-cfengine3-file-control-stdlib "body file control{ inputs => { '$(sys.libdir)/stdlib.cf' };}\n" "File control body to include the standard library from $(sys.libdir). It is useful to inject into an example source block before execution so that bundles and bodies from the standard library are automatically available.") (defun org-babel-execute:cfengine3 (body params) "Actuate a block of CFEngine 3 policy. This function is called by `org-babel-execute-src-block'. A temporary file is constructed containing `org-babel-cfengine3-file-control-stdlib and the body of the src block. `org-babel-cfengine3-command' is used to execute the temporary file." (let* ((temporary-file-directory ".") (tempfile (make-temp-file "cfengine3-"))) (with-temp-file tempfile ;; TODO Consider making automatic stdlib inclusion optional (insert org-babel-cfengine3-file-control-stdlib) (insert body)) (unwind-protect (shell-command-to-string (concat org-babel-cfengine3-command " " ;; TODO Consider adding a header option to specify bundlesequence org-babel-cfengine3-command-options " " (format " --file %s" tempfile))) (delete-file tempfile)))) Now any time I have a cfengine3 SRC block in org-mode I can simply run org-babel-execute-src-block ( CTRL-c CTRL-c in emacs/spacemacs documentation this is written as C-c C-c ) to have the block written to a temporary file, executed and the temporary file deleted. For example with my insertion placed inside the following SRC block.
This post was authored by Aleksey Tsalolikhin and has been re-published with his consent. I recently spoke at Digital Media Educators Conference (DMEC) on Infrastructure Management at Scale and the skills educators need to impart to up and coming system administrators. This conference serves the California community college system, which is dear to my heart. My mother worked at West Los Angeles College library her entire professional life in America, since we arrived in 1988. I used to volunteer and help her out with shelving in the summer. I was a very poor helper since I kept getting distracted by all the delicous books and did more reading than shelving. While in high school I took computer programming, math and English at West Los Angeles College and at Santa Monica Community College, at first during summer break and then concurrent with eleventh grade, which allowed me to go to University instead of going to 12th grade. So I have a personal connection to the California community college system and I jumped at the chance to contribute a talk: Because my presentation was in the Data Representation track, I focused on Inventory and Compliance Reporting so I could show off CFEngine’s slick UI. I started by laying out CFEngine’s philosophic groundwork: - Promise Theory and the advantages of voluntary cooperation and distributed work over the limitations of imposed direct control. - The advantages of pull over push (see “Push versus pull” in Deconstructing the `CAP theorem’ for CM and DevOps by the author of CFEngine for more on this), and - The Dunbar numbers which constrain the quality and quantity of relationships sysadmins are able to have with their infrastructures. The rest of the talk demonstrated how the design of CFEngine uses Dunbar numbers to focus the information it presents. We also talked about what computer system administration IS, and what the challenges are and how we handle them. Then I introduced the CFEngine dashboard: I pointed out the header which holds the host count (2, including the hub itself) and the health indicator (OK); the graph of Changes made by CFEngine, the fact that both of our hosts have Software Updates available (1 alert triggered on 2 hosts), and that we have 100% compliance on promise compliance and system health (green check-marks). The next slide, adding a third host (notice the hosts indicator up top), shows how the Alert for Software Updates changes to a 2/3 arc, as, right after adding the host, as at this point the hub knows 2 out of 3 hosts are missing software updates. Once the agent runs on the third host and the hub collects the report, the Alert will change back to a full circle with 3 out of 3 hosts are missing software updates. The next slide illustrates how CFEngine communicates the severity of the alert: critical issues are indicated in red, less severe in orange (amber for you Aussies), and mildest level is yellow. I induced a policy non-compliance situation on one of the three hosts (e.g., promised a file edit but prevented CFEngine from accessing the file by filling up the disk), so the Promise Compliance alert spans 1/3 of the circle (1 out of 3 hosts). Notice also that if CFEngine is unable to collect reports from a host or if an agent stops running on a host, the health indicator at the top of the screen changes from OK to a red number indicating the number of issues: You can see the number and type of issues: Notice that the Dunbar numbers are in play here: CFEngine tells you there are issues, and if you want more data, then you can have it. But it doesn’t throw all the detail at you at once, that would be too much. You can get more detail on which hosts are not reporting by selecting “Hosts not reporting” from the health indicator menu: You can then select a host in the list of hosts not reporting to see the info for that host (host detail). That actually takes us to the “Hosts” tab. The “Hosts” tab starts in the “all hosts” view, where you see the promise compliance summary for your infrastructure: You can list the hosts that have less than 100% compliance: You can see which promises were not kept on each host: And that takes us to the “Reports” tab. There are many reports available but let’s take a look at the Inventory Report. It starts out with four basic columns but you can add more: You can extend inventory collection by writing CFEngine promises, for example, here I’ve added inventory of the host’s timezone: Let’s say our company policy says all hosts must be in the UTC timezone. But in reality we have this: You can sort the column contents by selecting the column heading, this groups the outliers and brings them into view: You can graphically summarize column contents by selecting “Chart Data”: Voila! Hover over a slice to get more detail: Or switch to column view: Here is another example: The charts can be exported and embedded in reports to management, auditors, etc. Want to give CFEngine Enterprise a try? It’s very easy to download and install the hub package. Feel free to email me if you have any questions!
By now you have probably heard about the Badlock vulnerability (CVE-2016-2118)in DCE/RPC-based SAMR and LSA protocols used in the Microsoft Windows ActiveDirectory infrastructure as well as other critical security flows in Samba. With CFEngine Enterprise you can simply tag any variable or class and MissionPortals Inventory reporting interface will be automatically extended with the new attributes. This makes it easy to identify vulnerable hosts. Dashboard alerts can be created to alert on vulnerable hosts for specific subsets of infrastructure. Dashboard alerts can be integrated with other systems. For example you could automatically open an issue in Jira when vulnerable hosts are found. If you would like to use CFEngine to detect, repair and report on Badlock in your infrastructure, we have prepared some policies you can use: - Badlock reporting and remediation policy - Implementation Tutorial
Each year we like to take a moment to recognize outstanding community members for their contributions. Contributions come in the form of code contributions to core, organizing community meet-ups, giving talks about CFEngine at conferences, sharing policy, to helping other users on the mailing list and on IRC. This year the Community Advisory Board was responsible for selecting champions from the nominations, and it is my honor to announce the 2015 CFEngine Champion Hall of Fame inductees. Congratulations, and thanks for all of your efforts!
