Chef Infra Client 16.8.14 Released!

Chef Release Announcements
1

Hey folks,

I hope everyone is having a great Friday. As a special treat, we have a new release of Chef Infra Client for you to try out next week. It includes some great bug fixes and resource improvements as well as the return of packages for Solaris!

What's New:

Chef InSpec 4.24

Chef InSpec has been updated to 4.24.8 including the following improvements:

  • An unset `HOME environment variable will not cause execution failures
  • You can use wildcards in platform-name and release in InSpec profiles
  • The support for arrays in the WMI resource, so it can return multiple objects
  • The package resource on Windows properly escapes package names
  • The grub_conf resource succeeds even if without a menuentry in the grub config
  • Loaded plugins won't try to re-load themselves

Updated Resources

dsc_resource / dsc_script

The dsc_resource and dsc_script resources have been updated to use the powershell_exec helper for significantly improved performance executing the PowerShell commands.

hostname

The hostname resource has been updated to prevent failures when the default system hostname is set on macOS hosts.

remote_file

The remote_file resource has been updated to use certificates located in Chef Infra Client's trusted_certificates directory. Thanks for reporting this issue @carguel!

windows_certificate

The windows_certificate has been updated with a new exportable property that marks PFX files as exportable in the certificate store.

Ohai Improvements

  • A new optional Grub2 plugin can be enabled to expose GRUB2 environment variables.
  • Linode cloud detection has been improved.

Security Updates

Platform Packages

We are once again building packages for Solaris on Sparc and x86 platforms.

Get the Build

As always, you can download binaries directly from downloads.chef.io or by using the mixlib-install command-line utility:

$ mixlib-install download chef -v 16.8.14

Alternatively, you can install Chef Infra Client using one of the following command options:

# In Shell
$ curl https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- -P chef -v 16.8.14

# In Windows Powershell
. { iwr -useb https://omnitruck.chef.io/install.ps1 } | iex; install -project chef -version 16.8.14

If you want to give this version a spin in Test Kitchen, create or add the following to your kitchen.yml file:

provisioner:
  product_name: chef
  product_version: 16.8.14

Enjoy,
Tim

Meeting notes for December 17th, 2020