The prolific contributor and CFEngine Champion Bas Van der Vlies joins the team for a chat about his history and experience with CFEngine dating back to version 1.0.3.
For this special Halloween edition Bas joined Cody, Craig and Nick to reflect on his journey getting into information technology beginning with chemical engineering through joining the Dutch National Compute Center where he was managing many SGI and AIX machines and where he discovered CFEngine and how it could help him manage all the machines. Bas went on to highlight some of his favorite features and discussed how CFEngine has evolved over the years. His advice for both new and old users is to check out some of the newer tooling like cf-remote and cfbs for the CFEngine Build system as they can dramatically help to simplify policy maintenance.
Get CFEngine support in Zed, “The editor for what’s next”.
“Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI.” Cody and Nick are joined by Herman for an introduction to tree-sitter grammars, language servers and a quick demo of progress being made to add CFEngine support to the Zed editor. After reviewing the progress made and future work Nick shows some features of Emacs (Spacemacs) and Org-mode with CFEngine.
Ready for more CFEngine on Windows?
Join Cody, Craig and Nick for a walk through of some windows related build modules and policy that Craig has been working on. Craig talks about powershell, cmdlets, winget and docker and shows progress towards some new modules for CFEngine Build.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
Post show discussion 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.
Ever want to manage subvalues in a configuration file? In episode 39 we talk about using field_edits in edit_line bundles.
Cody and Craig join Nick as he prototypes and iterates on some policy showing how to manage subvalues in KEY = quoted values. A question raised during one of our recent post show discussions.
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.
Interested to see what’s new in the next LTS version (3.24) of CFEngine?
Nick joins Craig and Cody to see what’s coming in 3.24. From the new groups feature which allows you to assign data to a group of hosts to improvements in filtering and new functionality in Build and other changes in behavior, checkout the video for all the details.
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.
Curious about package management with CFEngine on Windows?
After sharing some history on Microsoft’s global advertising campaign for “Where do you want to go today?” Craig shared some of his recent experiments with several windows based package managers as well as their related challenges.
Craig discussed difficulties with the msiexec package module, such as distinguishing which packages need installation through msi while also identifying software for removal by name, a task that can be challenging. He demonstrated this using examples from winget, chocolatey, Scoop, and PowerShell’s install-module commands.
It’s easy to switch from Community to Enterprise.
Craig demonstrates the process of migrating from Community to Enterprise and touches on using many of the available components and tools from cf-remote to cf-net and so much in-between.
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.
Have you ever wanted some hosts to organize themselves into different groups, but without spending time to worry about assigning a specific group?
Cody, Craig, and Nick talk about using the select_class feature in CFEngine. Nick implements automatic assignment of a maintainer for each host:
You want to assign a maintainer to each host that should be the primary point of contact. Some hosts should may have a specific maintainer, but generally, you don’t care about the relationship between the person and the actual function of the machine. It’s okay if the groups are not perfectly balanced. First we provide a list of maintainers to select from.
Curious about getting visibility of a host where you can’t install CFEngine natively, but can run a container?
Craig shows us how he’s getting inventory from his Torizon Verdin IMX8MP by deploying a container with a chroot containing volumes bind mounted from the host.
A long post show discussion was had about CfgMgmtCamp as well as a long troubleshooting session dealing with a prickly package management situation.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
The CFEngine team celebrates 30 years of CFEngine and has a chat with Mark Burgess, the original creator and author of CFEngine.
Mark delves into the early chapters of his journey, tracing back the roots of his inspiration to science fiction sagas like Star Trek and Dr. Who, and the literary works of Isaac Asimov, Aurthur C. Clarke, and Paul Davies. Mark recalled his first computer, the fabulous, most programmable, decomposable, put back together-able, expandable thing, a BBC-b microcomputer.
