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. apt upgrade is being used to update all packages, but we need to exclude a specific package from the updates until the dependency chain has been resolved.
Have you seen what’s new in CFEngine 3.22.0?
Ole Herman Elgesem, CFEngine Product Manager joins Cody, Craig and Nick to give a tour of the changes in recently released CFEngine 3.22.0 Mission Portal. See how filters have been improved and how the new Groups feature makes it easier to affect change across your infrastructure and enforce package compliance with a new module, packages-allowlist-snapshot from CFEngine Build.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
Traditionally, CFEngine policy sets are managed as a whole. When upgrading the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF)1 users must download the new version of the policy framework and integrate it into the existing policy set, carefully diffing the vendored policy files against their currently integrated policy. Updates to policy authored by others must be sought out and similarly integrated. The burden is on the user to maintain the knowledge of where policy is sourced, if updates are available, and how it is integrated into the policy set as a whole.
Been a CFEngine user for a while? Have you migrated to a cfbs managed policy set yet?
Live from the Northern.tech Summit in Castell de Sant Mori1! Cody, Craig and Nick walk through the process of migrating a policy set to cfbs management. Go through the process yourself following the detailed Migrating to cfbs blog post.
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.
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.
Having a list of software that is allowed to be installed on a host is a strategy to prevent and fix security gaps and maintain compliance with operational guidelines. This zero-trust methodology ensures that only explicitly permitted applications are allowed to be present on a host unlike package block-listing which enumerates an explicit list of software that is not allowed to be present. In fact, with a software allow-list, you are essentially block-listing everything except the software you allow.
Can you trust the integrity of your base operating system runtime?
Jason Rogers and Dr. Wesley Peck of Invary join Cody, Craig and Nick to chat about their Runtime Integrity technology. They discuss the challenges of Trust, Information Technology Knowledge Management, and how Invary fits in the SecOps, Systems Automation, Security and Compliance landscape. Nick shares an example of an early integration between CFEngine and the Invary RISe agent1 with reporting in Mission Portal and talks about the different ways to approach integration.
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. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
What’s the best way to collect information when troubleshooting something with CFEngine?
Cody and Nick chat with Craig about cf-support a new tool shipping in the latest (and future) versions of CFEngine.
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.
For the holiday season gift yourself an improved infrastructure security posture.
Join Craig, Cody, and Nick as they wrap up 2022 and the 20th episode of “The agent is in” reviewing CFEngines’ 2022 Holiday Security Calendar which has advice picked straight from industry standard security hardening guides like the OpenSCAP Security Policies and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). Craig demos new modules like maintainers-in-motd, file-permissions, enable-aslr, highlights guidance on writing your own security policies and more.
