Show posts tagged:
policy-language

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 27 - CFEngine Q&A: Policy questions

Unlock the power of CFEngine with expert insights and get your burning policy questions. Cody, Craig and Nick discuss and answer CFEngine policy questions submitted by users. 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
July 27, 2023

Iterating on CFEngine policy for pinning packages in APT

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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
July 20, 2023

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 25 - Migrating to cfbs

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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
May 25, 2023

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 24 - Pretty printer (cffmt) demo with Miek Gieben

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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
April 27, 2023

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 22 - Hackathon: Termux Services

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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
February 23, 2023

Guest blog post: Don't use your distro's package manager

I have stopped using my Linux distro’s package manager, and you should, too. Maybe I should clarify that. I don’t install software with my distro’s package manager any more. I still upgrade my system. I became influenced by a few different factors. Top among these is something required in certain industries called a change advisory board or committee. This requirement says that changes to production computers have to be reviewed and approved by all stakeholders in that computer’s operations.

Posted by Jeff Carlson
January 23, 2023

5 security hardening CFEngine policy examples

Throughout the security holiday calendar, we’ve looked at modules for enforcing security requirements. Writing the policy to achieve these security hardening goals is easy. By learning how, you can write policy (or modules) for any requirements, including those specific to your organization. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at five beginner-level examples to get you started, focusing on the most common resources to manage with CFEngine; files and packages. All file names, package names, etc. are just examples and should be easy to modify to your desire.

December 19, 2022

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. This also aligns default directory permissions with default file permissions.

Posted by Nick Anderson
December 16, 2022

Show notes: The agent is in - Episode 18 - Policy examples

Do you know how to use every function available in CFEngine? Join Cody, Craig, Herman to see how Nick uses org-mode, org-roam, and ob-cfengine3 to manage his personal collection of CFEngine Function Examples. 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.

Posted by Nick Anderson
October 27, 2022

Extending autorun

What’s autorun? Autorun is a feature of the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF)1 that simplifies the process of adding and executing new policy. We have talked about Modular policies with autorun and the Augments before. This time, we dig into autorun a bit deeper to explore some of its current features and look at how to implement your own as we did during The agent is in, Episode 15 - Extending autorun Note: All paths unless otherwise noted are relative to the root of your policy set (typically /var/cfengine/masterfiles is the distribution point). cf-agent and other commands are run as the root user.

Posted by Nick Anderson
August 11, 2022