This year we decided to provide security focused modules and content for the holiday season. These are parts of the security configuration we implement on our own infrastructure, based on OpenSCAP and other sources. By putting these into easy to use modules and writing about it, we hope to give our community of users something valuable: Educational and easy to understand security tips, along with configuration which can quickly be automated across your entire infrastructure, using CFEngine.
Join us as we embark on an adventure to create and publish a new CFEngine Build module.
Nick (Doer of Things) demonstrates he knows the proper offerings the gods require by writing and publishing a new CFEngine Build Module from scratch, live, with no safety net!
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.
With the release of build.cfengine.com, I have been working to migrate some of our own security related policy into modules of their own. CFEngine Build and the cfbs tooling allows us to organize policy into modules, which are easy to update independently and share with other users. Let’s take the scenic route and look at what life is like with cfbs.
One of our security policies requires that the password hashing algorithm in /etc/login.
Have you ever wondered how a site was designed and how the ideas were conceptualized into the final result? If your answer is yes, you are in the right place! In this post, I will show you our journey to create our latest website, CFEngine Build. From start to finish, how did we do the design and make the design decisions? So without further delay, let’s jump straight in!
Branding and logo To have a logo that matches our objective for the website, we first need to reflect on our goal for the website.
Manually managing groups on a large infrastructure can be a tedious task, and is therefore best suited through automation software like CFEngine. Unfortunately - at time of writing - CFEngine does not have any built-in promise types for managing groups. But fear not; in CFEngine 3.17, custom promise types were introduced. This new exhilarating feature does not only allow for members of our community to make their own custom promise types, but also lets the CFEngine Core developers prototype new future promise types.
Come see what’s new in CFEngine policy management!
Herman (Product Manager) introduces and demonstrates new tooling, the CFEngine Build System (cfbs). cfbs is a command line tool to facilitate policy management and consuming modules written by others.
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.
Using modules, you can add custom promise types to CFEngine, to manage new resources. In this blog post, I’d like to introduce some of the first official modules, namely git and systemd promise types. They were both written by Fabio Tranchitella, who normally works on our other product, Mender.io. He decided to learn some CFEngine and within a couple of weeks he’s contributed 3 modules, showing just how easy it is to implement new promise types.
Come see the new hotness in the latest LTS series, 3.18!
Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) take a tour of 3.18.0, the first release in the latest LTS series. Join them in exploring dark mode, compliance reports, host specific data via Mission Portals CMDB, manually triggered agent runs, report collections, and CFEngine Build.
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.
This blog post will focus on the bash programming part of implementing a promise type. To understand what custom promise types are, and how to use them, you should read the introduction first.
To implement a custom promise type in CFEngine, you need a promise module. The module is an executable, and can be written in any language. It’s possible to write one from scratch, but to make it as easy as possible, we decided to provide libraries for common programming languages.
CFEngine 3.17.0 introduced custom promise types, which enable CFEngine users to extend core functionality and policy language in a simple way. As an example of the power and simplicity of this new feature, I will show a promise type that helps to observe a website’s status. The module which implements this promise type was written in a couple of hours.
Creating a promise type for whether a site is up We will use Python and the CFEngine library to implement a promise module.
