What’s the easiest way to install cfengine? Have you heard of cf-remote? cf-remote was born out of a developer’s itch for an easy way to get CFEngine installed on some host for testing. We have featured cf-remote in several posts1 since it was first released in 2019, but today is Friday, so let’s review its features.

To increase business agility, IT organizations are deploying dynamic, modern architectures enabled by virtualization technologies. That includes containers, elastic clouds, microservices, and virtual machines. If you are rethinking your IT stack, you must also reconsider its management. IT operational silos limit business velocity.

Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) are an excellent body of knowledge to leverage in securing your infrastructure. With the stig-rhel-7 module you can easily add inventory and remediation policy for RHEL 7 with CFEngine. Do note that as of March 2024 this module does not provide comprehensive coverage but rather an initial 10 findings are implemented.

The xz backdoor is a vulnerability in XZ Utils, a popular data compression library. The xz backdoor can let unauthorized users gain admin-level access to systems, endangering data security and much more. Read on to learn more about the xz backdoor, who’s affected, and what you can do now to find out if your systems are at risk.

When you want to inspect both the return code and output from a command execresult_as_data() might be the function you are searching for. Most CFEngine policy writers have used execresult() and returnszero(). They are useful when you want to do something based on the output of a command or based on its successful execution (returning zero). For example: /tmp/feature-friday-3.cf command output But, sometimes, you care about specific return codes.

Patch management software automatically applies updates to software, firmware, and other system components. Patching makes sure resources are up to date with the latest security and performance improvements to keep software protected and performing as expected.