The Host Info Report has been available in CFEngine Enterprise for some time, it will now be available to community users in CFEngine 3.6. The Host Info Report is a great way to get value immediately if you are using CFEngine for the first time.
So what does it do? The Host Info Report contains detailed information on the host that CFEngine is running on. Read on to learn more about how to enable and use the report.
Over the next few months we’ll be blogging about some of the great features, enhancements and bug fixes coming in CFEngine 3.6. All too often new software is released without anyone taking the time to tell you what’s been done and why it matters.
To start the series we have a blog post by Nick Anderson on the new Host Info Report in the community edition.
Check back each week to learn more about CFEngine 3.6.
We are quickly becoming a more software defined world. The music, movie, automotive and telecoms are examples of industries going through disruptiveness due to innovative software defined products. In this new world, IT-operational efficiency has risen to be more critical to businesses than ever.
Thanks to software and open source, the world is a more transparent place. Innovation is as much about speed as it is about coming up with that great next new idea. In efficient markets, ideas are quickly copied. The best way to stay ahead of competition is to continuously bring new products and services to market. The value of speed at which a company introduces new products and improves new versions based on market feedback has become paramount to success. The world accelerates in its need for new products and services. The connected- and smart-phone based economies emerge as the leaders of this new world-order, where new versions of products are introduced to the market on weekly, and even daily basis.
My name is Jonathan Thorpe and I recently joined CFEngine to work with the CFEngine community. I’ve spent the past 15 years or so working in several different roles ranging from development, build maintenance, management and finally onto community and customer facing roles.
When I got the opportunity to work with the CFEngine community it was a very easy decision to join CFEngine. While I’ve only been on the job for a week I’ve had an amazing experience so far. Scale was my first show with CFEngine and I came back extremely energized and enthusiastic about the CFEngine community in SoCal.
Originally posted by Nick on cmdln.org
You never know when the Zombie or Cloud Apocalypse is coming. It’s good to be able to locate those buried bodies quickly and easily. OK, enough bad jokes, but haven’t you ever looked at some CFEngine policy and wondered to yourself, exactly what does “delete => tidy” or some other body or bundle do?
I have. I even wrote a little perl script to locate the files that contained a specific body or bundle and then print out the single body or bundle. This past week my old script got some love. Ted Zlatanov and Bishwa Shrestha reworked it a bit so that it is no longer a hackjob, and it’s now included in contrib of the CFEngine core repository.
We’re proud to release the first Beta package of CFEngine 3.6 to the Community for testing. The new version of CFEngine introduces a huge number of new features to the CFEngine language and a lot of improvements behind the scene. Some highlights from the ChangeLog file: - New promise type “users” for managing local user accounts. - TLS authentication and fully encrypted network protocol - New attributes in ‘bundle server access_rules’ - New variable type ‘data’ for handling of structured data - Tagging of classes and variables with meta data - Many new built-in variables - Many new functions You can download the beta packages for Debian and RedHat based Linux distributions from https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace. The documentation for CFEngine 3.6 lives at https://cfengine.com/docs/master/index.html and is work in progress. We’d like to invite everybody to help us improve CFEngine 3.6 by giving this first beta a trial run. However, this version of CFEngine is not yet ready for production environments, so do not upgrade your existing installation to these packages. Due to the network protocol and authentication changes, compatibility between 3.6 and previous CFEngine versions is limited at this point, and will be improved over the coming weeks as we get closer to the release. To report bugs, use our bug tracker at https://cfengine.com/dev. Contributions in form of pull requests can be made on GitHub at https://github.com/cfengine/core. A big shout-out to all the contributors in the community that have supported our work with feedback, bug reports, input to design discussions and code contributions!
Another year has passed and we would like to take a moment to thank the community members for their contributions. From speaking at conferences, epic blog posts, community meet-ups, to support on the CFEngine help list and in the IRC channel, new and veteran users alike don’t have to look far to find inspiration or a helping hand. Each year we like to reflect on our many community contributors and honor those that have significantly enhanced the CFEngine Community. This year it is my great honor to announce this year’s CFEngine Champion Hall of Fame inductees.
Having joined CFEngine only a few months ago (and being new to the Open Source movement and culture), attending our Bay Area meetup allowed me to come face to face with our community and hear about CFEngine deployment from the people who use it as their main tool. And let me tell you, there are some serious CFEngine warriors out there! In this blog post I will feature two of them. By pure chance both of them are called Bruce, but don’t worry, it’s not a prerequisite to be called that to join our community!
Many users have been asking for ways to limit the amount of some function invocations in CFEngine, inparticular functions such as execresult and returnszero. First, let me try to explain why functions were called so many times to begin with, and how we have approached this for version 3.6.
Functions may be executed during checking with cf-promises, or during normal evaluation.
When cf-agent executes a policy, it first runs it through checking with cf-promises. Many policy checks are static in nature (types, keywords, etc.), but since CFEngine is a fairly dynamic language, certain problems may only arise at run-time. Therefore, cf-promises has traditionally attempted to find these problems by executing all functions. For 3.6, we have turned off function evaluation for cf-promises, but retained the old behavior optionally using the flag –eval-functions.
CFEngine 3.5.3 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions.
Changes in the CFEngine Core: Improved security checks of symlink ownership. A symlink created by a user pointing to resources owned by a different user will no longer be followed.
Changed the way package versions are compared in package promises. (Redmine #3314) In previous versions the comparison was inconsistent. This has been fixed, but may also lead to behavior changes in certain cases. In CFEngine 3.5.3, the comparison works as follows: <package-being-considered> <package_select> <package_version> For instance: apache-2.2.31 “>=” “2.2.0” will result in the package being installed. Bug fixes:
