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Bcfg2 1.3.3

We are happy to announce the release of Bcfg2 1.3.3. It is available for download at:

ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg

This release fixes a great number of bugs in 1.3.2, but it also comes with many fun and exciting new features. Please read the release notes thoroughly.

The following user-facing change is included:

  • The when attribute of Action tags is now honored even with timing set to "pre" or "both".

The following is a non-exhaustive list of new features and bug fixes:

  • New AWSTags plugin sets groups and supplies data from AWS tag data: http://docs.bcfg2.org/server/plugins/connectors/awstags.html
  • Completely rewritten (and deduplicated) spec file for building RPMs
  • Completely rewritten bcfg2-crypt, which adds some features to allow decrypting Cfg files and encrypting/decrypting Properties files without specifying passphrases on the command line.
  • Multiprocessing core now actually works
  • Handle high-latency reporting database connections better
  • Timeout incomplete XML-RPC calls correctly and avoid stray threads.
  • Ensure that XIncluded Bundler and Properties files are monitored for changes
  • SSH key generation generation fixes:
    • More complete way to specify authorized_keys options
    • Fixed setting category specificity for authorized_keys
    • Properly generate public keys from private keys
  • Connector plugins can now create new groups and set options on them
  • Properly remove ACLs from managed files
  • POSIX improvements to help running as non-root (e.g., bcfg2-info builddir)
  • Fixes to clients.xml writing:
    • Reread clients.xml on every write. This could reduce performance if clients.xml is frequently updated, but also resolves a race condition where a new client may fail to declare its version or assert its profile.
    • Reduce number of clients.xml writes due to gratuitous profile assertions.
  • Chkconfig bugs fixed
    • List all services correctly
    • Let chkconfig assign default runlevels according to the init script
  • Fixed return value from bcfg2-test
  • Use fam_blocking option in all commands that start a server (bcfg2-info, bcfg2-test, etc.)
  • Reduce noise from encryption failures with decrypt=lax
  • POSIXUsers driver works better with older usermod
  • bcfg2-yum-helper improvements:
    • Much much better (and far less error-prone) yum caching
    • Added timeout to fix hanging yum problem
  • bcfg2-info fixes:
    • Fixed automatch behavior
    • Added expirecache command to expire metadata cache
  • Fixed inconsistent initial metadata group ordering and searching, which could result in inconsistent category suppression
  • SELinux properly looks up the default context in all cases
  • Several performance improvements, particularly on startup
  • Better packages caching
  • Various logging improvements
  • Various error handling improvements
  • Various Debian/Ubuntu build fixes
  • Various bcfg2-admin viz fixes and improvements
  • Various UTF-8/unicode fixes

Special thanks to all of our contributors for 1.3.3: Alexander Sulfrian, Arto Jantunen, Duncan Hutty, Igor Widlinski, Jason Kincl, John Morris, Jonathan Billings, Michael Fenn, Stéphane Graber, and Tim Laszlo