1.3.0 Prerelease 1 Release Announcement

The first prerelease for Bcfg2 1.3.0 is now available at:

​ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/bcfg

Bcfg2 1.3.0pre1 is a prerelease, and contains many new features, including some that are backwards-incompatible with Bcfg2 1.2.x and earlier. Please read the release notes thoroughly. The code is fairly stable, but this is a prerelease and as such is not likely suitable for general production deployment. That said, please help us test the release in non- and preproduction environments.

The following are major, backwards-incompatible user-facing changes:

• Reworked service modes to make them more consistent and granular. A tool located at tools/upgrade/1.3/service_modes.py can assist in migrating your old configurations. Due to this change, a Bcfg2 1.3 server will work with Bcfg2 1.2 (and earlier) clients with the ServiceCompat plugin enabled, but a Bcfg2 1.2 (or earlier) server will not work with Bcfg2 1.3 clients. (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/rules.html#service-mode-specification)
• Moved configuration for several plugins (Rules, Packages) into base bcfg2.conf file. Reworked database configuration for DBStats to make it more accessible to other plugins. A tool located at tools/upgrade/1.3/migrate_configs.py can assist in migrating your old configurations.

The following plugins and features have been deprecated, and will be removed in a future release, likely 1.4:

• Accounts
• Hostbase
• Snapshots
• Statistics
• TCheetah
• TGenshi
• info and :info files
• .cat and .diff files

The following deprecated plugins have been removed:

• BB
• SGenshi
• Svcmgr

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

• Numerous big fixes
• Documentation fixes
• bcfg2-reports web interface improvements
• inotify filemonitor (drop-in replacement for gamin/fam)
• DB2 support for reports
• Encryption support
  • Ability to store encrypted Cfg/TGenshi/TCheetah files (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/cfg.html#encrypted-files)
  • Properties element encryption (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/properties.html#encrypted-properties-data)
  • bcfg2-crypt utility for encrypting Properties and Cfg files
• New bcfg2-test tool for building all client configurations and verifying that they contain no failures. (Raul Cuza/Calen? Pennington)
• New tools
  • SVN postcommit log message script
  • template render benchmarking script
• Support for on-the-fly or on-demand Cfg file syntax checking (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/cfg.html#content-validation)
• Much improved Genshi error handling
• New Properties convenience method, XMLMatch(), and automatch attribute allow you to write structured Properties files and then automatically access only data apropos to a client in templates rendered for that client (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/properties.html#automatch)
• Implemented "service removal" (via status attribute #1075)
• Improvements to bcfg2-admin interface
• OpenCSW client tool
• Support for Puppet External Node Classifiers (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/puppetenc.html)
• SELinux support (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/selinux.html)
• IPV6 support
• New, optional, higher-performance CherryPy 3.2-based server core (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/backends.html)
• Ability to query by bundle name in bcfg2-admin query
• Metadata enhancements
  • Client tags, nested Group tags, and negated Group and Client tags in groups.xml (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/grouping/metadata.html#metadata-groups-xml)
  • Database-backed plugin for storage (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/grouping/metadata.html#clients-database)
• Ability to store probe data in database instead of probed.xml (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/probes/index.html#data-storage)
• Support for ACLs (on filesystems that support them) (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/generators/rules.htmlacls)
• New TemplateHelper plugin allows storing and versioning Python snippets used in templates along with the rest of your Bcfg2 specification (​http://docs.bcfg2.org/dev/server/plugins/connectors/templatehelper.html)
• Added lots of unit tests and started using ​http://travis-ci.org for Continuous Integration testing
• Improvements to XInclude handling (includes-of-includes, relative include fixes, XInclude support in more files)
• Fixed and made configurable XML-RPC retries

As usual, a monstrously huge shout-out to our many contributors; for 1.3.0 we received contributes from many people, including:

• Arto Jantunen
• Brent Bloxam
• Calen Pennington
• Calvin Cheng
• Christopher 'm4z' Holm
• Dan Foster
• DongInn Kim
• Fabian Affolter
• Jack Neely
• Jake Davis
• Jeroen Dekkers
• John 'Skip' Reddy
• Jonathan Billings
• Luke Cyca
• Matt Kemp
• Raul Cuza
• Tim Laszlo
• Torsten Rehn