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!
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
3.6 and 3.8 are no longer maintained. If you are still on any of these versions, please consider upgrading. 3.7 LTS is maintained (and supported for Enterprise customers) until July 17th 2018 3.9 non-LTS is maintained until December 2016 For CFEngine Enterprise customers, the only supported release today is 3.7. The next supported release will be 3.10 LTS due end of 2016, which will be supported through the end of 2019. If you are planning to contribute improvements to 3.10 (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests ready for merging by mid-September in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.10.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.9.0 non-LTS now is released! A big thanks to everyone testing the 3.9.0 beta release! Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers (but packages are available for testing). The established CFEngine release schedule gives an overview over the release timelines for all releases.
Running remote bundles CFEngine 3.9 introduces a simple way to trigger bundles to run remotely by using cf-runagent –remote-bundles to ask a remote cf-serverd to run a given set of bundles. For example:
As someone responsible for IT operations, you have probably spent most of your time thinking of ways to improve your team’s effectiveness and efficiency to make it more competitive. At CFEngine, we have witnessed the management of IT infrastructure and organizations operating across the spectrum of the performance scale. Where are you on that scale and how can you improve? In the world of IT operations, a negatively skewed distribution seems to exist. The majority of companies, despite their admirable DevOps initiatives, struggle. The great minority who are masters of execution continuously increase their relative competitiveness leaving the others behind. In my previous post, “The painful road to the digital economy,” I pointed out some ideas as to why becoming more competitive seems so hard for Fortune 2000 companies and suggested ways to improve. It might be worth a read if you find yourself too far on the left side in the illustration below. The characteristics of a poor and reactive versus proactive and high-performing IT organization can be many. Below you will find some of the most common observed with our own users. Have a look and compare them with your own state of operations.
We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.9.0 non-LTS beta is now ready for testing! The established CFEngine release schedule shows that the 3.9.0 final version is due in June 2016, so it’s time to test and fix any remaining issues. Please note that this is a non-LTS release, which means that it is maintained for 6 months from the release date and not supported for CFEngine Enterprise customers, but packages are available for testing.
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
We’re happy to announce maintenance releases for all 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 until July 17th 2018 3.6 is maintained until July 17th 2016 (released before CFEngine incorporated the LTS model) 3.8 (being a non-LTS release) is maintained until 3.9.0 is released For CFEngine Enterprise customers, the supported releases as of today are 3.7 and 3.6. If you are on 3.6, it is a good time to prepare for an upgrade to 3.7, as the next supported minor release will be 3.10 LTS due end of 2016. If you are planning to contribute improvements to 3.9 (thank you!), please note that we would need the pull requests by beginning of April in order to have time to incorporate them into 3.9.
CFEngine is one of the most widely used infrastructure automation solutions in the world, being leveraged by some of the biggest organizations in the world for infrastructure management. eZuce is an Enterprise provider of Unified Communications, Voice and Video Conferencing solutions and is being used by many of their customers to improve business processes. eZuce has been shipping CFEngine inside of UniteMe since 2012 and have benefited from the following by using the popular configuration management solution:
Update Mar 23, 2016: We are happy to announce that the transition to JIRA has been successful. The new URL is https://northerntech.atlassian.net/projects/CFE. All existing issues from Redmine have been transferred to JIRA. Redirects are in place for the old URLs. All users have been migrated, however please be aware you must request a new password the first time you login. As you can read from the URL, CFEngine is now a project under Mender Software AS. Mender Software is the name of the Norwegian holding company that is the owner of CFEngine. For several years we had been using Redmine to track CFEngine issues and bugs. Redmine served us well, but after thorough evaluation we found that time has come to move on to JIRA. The main benefits for this shift are:
