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