Show posts tagged:
change-in-behavior

Change in behavior: The arglist attribute now preserves spaces

When executing commands in a shell, the program and its arguments are typically separated by spaces. This command reads the content of two files and prints it out (concatenating it): command cat one.txt two.txt In the example above, cat is the command / program, while one.txt is the first argument, and two.txt is the second argument. This is great because it makes commands really easy to read and type, however there is one obvious drawback: When a space has a special meaning (separating arguments), what do you do when you actually need a space?

Posted by Lars Erik Wik
January 17, 2024

Change in behavior: ignore_interfaces.rx prefers a new location

ignore_interfaces.rx can be populated with regular expressions that match network interface names. When an interface matches CFEngine will ignore the interface. In the upcoming release of 3.23.0, and in the future release of 3.21.4 there is a change in behavior with respect to the preferred location of ignore_interfaces.rx from $(sys.inputdir) (typically /var/cfengine/inputs) to $(sys.workdir) (typically /var/cfengine). The change from $(sys.inputdir) to $(sys.workdir) makes it easier to ignore different interfaces on different hosts.

Posted by Nick Anderson
November 16, 2023

Change in behavior: self upgrade now defaults to hub binary version

In the upcoming release of 3.23.0, there is a change in behavior with respect to the self upgrade policy. Beginning with 3.23.0 the self upgrade policy will default to the binary version that is running on the hub instead of the version of the policy framework that is executing. When upgrading CFEngine1 there are three major steps: Upgrade the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) Upgrade the hub binaries Upgrade the client binaries Generally it’s desirable that the MPF version is equal to or greater than the hub binary version and the hub binary version is equal to or greater than the client binary version.

Posted by Nick Anderson
November 15, 2023

Change in behavior: Directories are now created with 700 instead of 755

In the upcoming release of CFEngine 3.21.0 there is a change in behavior with respect to default permissions of created directories. From 3.21.0 and later directories will be created with read, write, execute permissions only for the file owner. No permissions are granted for group or other. This change improves the default security posture to make sure that only the user executing CFEngine (typically root) will have access to content in newly created directories.

Posted by Nick Anderson
December 16, 2022

Change in behavior: multiple cf-execd processes

Recently we introduced new feature where you can trigger agent runs and report collection from the Mission Portal UI. This required our daemon cf-execd to behave a bit differently when periodic agent runs occur. Previously the daemon would create a new thread in which to run cf-agent, capture output, wait for completion and move on. We changed the behavior so that the daemon forks itself and then fork/execs cf-agent as before, with the forked cf-execd processing agent run output.

Posted by Craig Comstock
June 15, 2022

Change in behavior: Creating files by default

In the upcoming CFEngine 3.20 release we are making a change in the behaviour of the create attribute for the files promises that manage the entire content of a file. This includes promises with the template methods mustache, inline_mustache and cfengine; as well as promises with the content attribute. The motivation behind these new changes is two-fold; make it easier to learn CFEngine policy language and understand what policy is doing, and to prevent CFEngine from creating empty configuration files.

Posted by Lars Erik Wik
April 22, 2022

Change in behavior: Renaming bundle agent main

A recent change in the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) is renaming bundle agent main to bundle agent mpf_main. This change is intended to make it easier to run individual parts of your policy leveraging the library main bundle functionality (bundle agent __main__). Library main bundles were first introduced in CFEngine 3.12.0. The functionality allows for the definition of bundle agent __main__. When this bundle definition is present in the policy entry (the first policy file that CFEngine reads) the bundle is understood to be used as the default bundlesequence.

Posted by Nick Anderson
April 11, 2022

Change in behavior: Directory permissions and the execute bit

rxdirs has provided a convenient default when setting permissions recursively. When enabled (the default prior to version 3.20.0) a promise to grant read access on a directory is extended to also include execution since quite commonly if you want to read a directory you also want to be able to list the files in the directory. However, the convenience comes with the cost of complicating security reviews since the state requested on the surface is more strict than what is actually granted.

Posted by Nick Anderson
March 29, 2022
Get in touch with us
to discuss how we can help!
Contact us
Sign up for
our newsletter
By signing up, you agree to your email address being stored and used to receive newsletters about CFEngine. We use tracking in our newsletter emails to improve our marketing content.