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