Author:

Joshua Timberman

Joshua Timberman is a Code Cleric at CHEF, where he Cures Technical Debt Wounds for 1d8+5 lines of code, casts Protection from Yaks, and otherwise helps continuously improve internal technical process.


Continuous Delivery of Habitat Packages with Chef Automate

This post was originally published on the SysAdvent blog on December 21, 2017. Introduction Habitat by Chef is a framework for building, deploying, and running any kind of application. Chef’s blog has a good introductory series on the concepts behind Habitat, and the Habitat tutorial is a good place to start learning.

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Remediating “escaped defects” within continuous delivery

Today I’m going to share a story about an incident we had here at Chef on September 9, 2015. Normally we don’t make a public blog post about an internal-only incident, but this particular issue had some contributing factors that are related to our ChefDK project, and affected the release schedule for version 0.8.0.

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You Got Unix In My Ruby!

Or: Writing Ruby test code to verify Unix/Linux systems for auditing purposes Many organizations must adhere to PCI-DSS requirements, or similar standards. However, those standards are often not specific, so we cannot rely on them to give implementation details.

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System Archaeology Through Testing

As you may be aware, I have been working on a Chef audit-mode cookbook that implements the CIS Benchmarks. I recently added coverage for Ubuntu 14.04.

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Chef Audit Mode Introduction

I have been working with the audit mode feature introduced in Chef version 12.1.0 – previously announced was the audit-cis cookbook. Audit mode allows users to write custom rules (controls) in Chef recipes using new DSL helpers.

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Chef Audit Mode: CIS Benchmarks

Today we’ve released an initial version of audit-cis. This is an “audit mode only” cookbook that runs on a node to check for compliance with The Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark for a specific platform. This release targets CentOS 7, CIS Benchmark version 1.0.0.

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Bento Box Update for CentOS and Fedora

This is not urgent, but you may encounter SSL verification errors when using vagrant directly, or vagrant through test kitchen. Special Thanks to Joe Damato of Package Cloud for spending his time debugging this issue with me the other day.

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Quick Tip: Create a Provisioner Node

This post originally appeared on jtimberman’s Code Blog. This quick tip is brought to you by my preparation for my ChefConf talk about using Chef Provisioning to build a Chef Server Cluster, which is based on my blog post about the same.

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SysAdvent Day 14: Using Chef Provisioning to Build Chef Server

Or, Yo Dawg, I heard you like Chef. This post originally appeared on SysAdvent. This post is dedicated to Ezra Zygmuntowicz. Without Ezra, we wouldn’t have had Merb for the original Chef server, chef-solo, and maybe not even Chef itself. His contributions to the Ruby, Rails, and Chef communities are immense. Thanks, Ezra, RIP.

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Chef 12: Fix Untrusted Self Signed Certificates

This post originally appeared on jtimberman’s Code Blog. Scenario: You’ve started up a brand new Chef Server using version 12, and you have installed Chef 12 on your local system.

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