Meeting notes for June 18th, 2020

Community Meetings
1

Below are the meeting notes for this week's Community Meeting, a text-based meeting held weekly in #community-meetings on our community slack, which you can join: https://community-slack.chef.io/

DevRel/Community

bennyVasquez shared

hi all! This week I want to focus on the work we’re continuing on the new Learn Chef platform.

  • …in case you missed it during ChefConf: we launched Learn Chef (no more Rally) on a new platform powered by Appsembler built on Open edX. Learning paths are now organized into Courses, some of which are augmented with the new in-browser lab platform (so you don’t have to download and or configure your own environments).
  • One note: You will need to register anew, even if you had an “account” on the old platform. We recommend you register using the same email address you used on the old system. (extra info for those that are curious: The platform allowed you to “log in” to track progress and get badges but never had actual accounts. Badges were migrated to the new platform)

We have many plans for improvements and new courses over the next few months, so keep a look out for the updates!

This week’s releases

Chef Automate

tas50 shared

Speaking of Automate. The Automate team released 20200610173731 which includes a nice new option to auto log out users when they close the browser in addition to some nice bug fixes, especially A11y fixes https://discourse.chef.io/t/automate-2-version-20200610173731-released/17267

Chef Manage

tas50 shared

Chef Manage 3.0 shipped. I bet you haven't thought about that in a while. This modernizes a bunch of components in the stack to resolve some Ruby / Rails / OpenSSL CVEs.

It also comes with some nice additions though

  • communication between manage the the Chef Infra Server is over SSL now (thus the breaking change since you need to set this up)
  • Packages are now built for RHEL 7 /8 and Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04
  • The version of Chef Infra Client within manage was upgraded from 11 -> 14. Quite the upgrade there

As mentioned in the release notes we don't expect another major release. All work on infra management continues to take place in Automate.

https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-manage-3-0-released/17282

Chef Infra Client

tas50 shared

Last, but not least we have a pretty big release of Chef Infra Client 16.2: https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-infra-client-16-2-released/17284

  • New windows_audit_policy and homebrew_update resources
  • The ability to control ssl verification per resource in remote_file
  • The ability to pass stdin to commands in the execute resources
  • Powershell_package on 2k12 - 2k16 once again works with PowerShell Gallery after Microsoft broke things by requiring TLS 1.2 there
  • Windows 8 packages are now produced and tested

there's a bunch of other stuff. A ton of resource fixes and improvements. Lots of under the hood refactoring from our team member on Infra @pete

Chef Inspec

tas50 shared

InSpec 4.20.6 shipped with a fix for parsing TOML configs https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-inspec-4-20-6-released/17281 . There's a known regression here where this release does not work with kitchen-inspec. Expect a follow up release today

Other releases

tas50 shared

Several new Bento boxes shipped. CentOS 8.2 and FreeBSD 11.4 i386 boxes are up. Additionally many of the Ubuntu and CentOS boxes are now up for Hyper-V. I'm hoping to automate that further. It's pretty painful to do from my laptop, but ideally everything is also in hyper-v format

Updates

Chef Automate

Alex Pop shared

Hi from the Automate team!

  • We removed an Automate post login error banner for SAML/LDAP users.
  • Investigating the ability to ingest compliance reports where InSpec encountered a runtime exception.
  • Added an UI option to download a Desktop historical data as JSON or CSV.
  • Improved the auto-generated documentation.
  • Merged a change when control (deep) filtering. Nodes listed matches the requested status filter.
  • Added tooltips for information about what each section is for on Desktop
  • Added APIs to show the progress of policyfile code rollouts.
  • We have ongoing research & development for compliance remediation.

Chef Habitat

sdmacfarlane shared

Greetings from the Habitat team!

  • Beginning the refactor to introduce the new graph work to run in parallel with the existing graph
  • Starting planning for the first slice of notifications work
  • Continuing work to add supervisor config and improve service bootstrapping
  • Supervisor rumor modeling continuing in the background, the models take a while to run.
  • Working on the uninstall hook

Chef Infra Client

tas50 shared

As far as Chef Infra Client team work:

  • 16.2 is out the door with a bunch of fixes
  • Chef Desktop cookbook 1.0 was released with some nice new desktop management resources
  • Working on an open PR for windows_firewall_profile resource
  • Additional dnf_package cleaned based on user feedback
  • Expanding our testing including some work that's spinning up around bootstrap testing

Chef Inspec

schwad shared

Hello from the InSpec team!

This was a quieter week on our end, with a decent number of changes being internal improvements. We have started investing some time investigating large, new features for future development. We can’t say anything about them yet, just that we’re very excited for the future!

We have a release that is just moments away from coming out, which fixes a regression (mentioned earlier) with the 4.20.6 InSpec release. (Should be version 4.20.10)

4.20.6 from earlier this week includes a bugfix where certain substrings within a .toml file no longer cause unexpected crashes. Thanks and have a great week!

Chef Workstation

tball shared

Howdy! We have had a bunch of people taking time off (myself included) since ChefConf, so no progress updates from our team. We're currently working on planning for the second half of the year. I'm also going to start working on a release of Chef Workstation which includes Chef Infra Client 16.2

Sous Chefs

john shared

it’s going well! a lot has been happening. Cookbook releases:

Memcached 6.1.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Restore Chef Infra Client < 16 compatibility ( @tas50 )

Java 8.3.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Restore compatibility with Chef Infra Client < 16 ( @tas50 )
  • Update Fedora releases in the Kitchen configs

Apache2 8.2.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Updated helpers to use platform_family? when possible to simplify code ( @tas50 )
  • Fixed incorrect platform version comparison logic in the helpers ( @tas50 )
  • Add new platforms to the Kitchen configs ( @tas50 )
  • Remove logic in the Linux helpers that checked for systemd vs. non-systemd since we only support systemd platforms now ( @tas50 )

MongoDB 4.1.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Restore Chef Infra Client < 16 compatibility ( @tas50 )

DPKG_autostart 0.4.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Restore Chef Infra Client < 16 compatibility ( @tas50 )

Line 2.9.0 (2020-06-18)

  • Restore compatibility with Chef Infra Client < 16 ( @tas50 )

Filesystem 2.0.2 (2020-06-18)

  • Removed Dangerfile from rubocop.yml
  • Deleted rubocop.yml
  • Ran latest cookstyle to clean up minor style issues

Aptly 2.1.2 (2020-06-18)

  • Fixed Debian platform version in the spec tests

Finally we have the new Board members for 2020:

Xorima shared:

We should also like to thank @john for all his hard work on the board this year, and wish him well. (Seriously I would have forgot to do a board vote without him!)

And also Welcome @ramereth to the board

Cinc Updates

ramereth shared

Cinc Client:

Cinc Auditor:

  • Released 4.20.6
  • Plan to add builds for Amazon Linux 2 soon
  • Plan to look into adding builds for aarch64 soon

Cinc Workstation:

  • Working on resolving an issue with knife bootstrap still asking to accept the Chef EULA. We currently have an upstream PR opened, however we need to work with Chef to come up with a better long term solution. ( https://github.com/chef/chef/pull/9992 )
  • Plan on building a Windows package that excludes the "Workstation App" so we can at least get some testing from users. Currently we're having issues building this app on Windows which is why we don't have a build for it yet. We'll work on getting the App working on Windows later.

Cinc Server:

  • Working on refactoring how we build our omnibus containers to use a cookbook. Our Dockerfile was getting too complicated for dealing with platform nuances and this is a better long term solution. This will bring in a fix for why builds are currently broken on CentOS 6 hopefully

Misc:

  • Added a third x86_64 Gitlab runner node to help assist with jobs queuing.

See you next week!

2

This topic was automatically closed after 3 days. New replies are no longer allowed.