CFEngine 3.6.3 now available: HP-UX support and UI performance

Posted by: Eystein Maloy Stenberg

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CFEngine 3.6.3 is released! The new version brings broader platform support, UI performance and usability enhancements as well as bugfixes.

It has again been about 8 weeks since the last release, and we are planning to further shorten the release intervals going forward to bring you enhancements faster. What you will also notice is that the focus is on stability and performance for 3.6.x releases, in order to make upgrades as safe as possible. Features and larger changes will be provided in the 3.7 branch.

Broader platform support

CFEngine is written in C and is therefore probably the most portable configuration management tool out there. However, there are tests that need to be run and usually minor changes needed in order to add a platform to the supported list.

This has now been done for one more platform as CFEngine 3.6.3 adds support for HP-UX 11.23 and later, on the Itanium architecture! This means that if you have HP-UX in your infrastructure, you can finally have one tool to manage everything!

For CFEngine Enterprise, a binary depot package is provided. CFEngine community users can compile from source, but now rest assured that HP-UX is a first-class citizen to CFEngine with respect to release testing.

Experimental support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is provided in 3.6.3. This means that the package and agent has gone through manual testing, but testing is not yet as comprehensive as the supported platforms, so there might be some minor issues discovered along the way. Furthermore, there is no Enterprise hub package for RHEL 7 yet. The rpm-based host package can be used on RHEL 7.

Also see the Known issues documentation page for platform-specific sections and please report any other issues you find in the issue tracker.

UI performance improvements

The CFEngine Mission Portal UI Dashboard has gotten a big performance improvement; the out-of-the-box alerts will now load 5x faster! This is due to optimization of Software updates type of alerts. If you have several Software updates alerts, the difference from 3.6.2 is going to be even more substantial.

The inventory reporting interface has also gotten a similar performance enhancement, with load time being 3x as fast as 3.6.2!

Both these performance enhancements were obtained by adjusting the SQL query that is run against the PostgreSQL backend. Of course, they are fully backward-compatible, so existing alerts and reports will continue to function seamlessly.

Other changes

As usual, the Mission Portal UI has gotten several usability improvements. This time the LDAP settings search filter help text and validation is the most visible one.

A more comprehensive list of changes for CFEngine Community can be found in the change log.

Get it!

As always, you can download CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.3 packages for the supported platforms, or give it a quick spin with the CFEngine 3.6.3 vagrant environment.

If you are using the Community Edition, we provide you with source code, packages, and package repositories – to make sure we cover the distribution channel of your choice!

We hope you enjoy 3.6.3, and we look forward to hearing about your experience in the CFEngine Google Group!