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Ohai 0.6.12 released!

The next release of Ohai is upon us and includes the new platform_family attribute as well as Oracle Linux support.

Cookbook authors are often writing cookbooks that support both Debian based Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and Redhat based Linux distributions, such as CentOS. Often these cookbooks will work fine on other derivatives if only their platform was included in the conditional. The platform_family attribute relates these distributions with their common parent, simplifying your conditionals and giving greater platform support in cookbooks.

The initial set of values is:
debian: debian, ubuntu, mint
rhel: redhat, centos, oracle, scientific, amazon, enterprise
enterprise fedora: fedora
suse: suse
gentoo: gentoo
slackware: slackware
arch: arch

After a beta release, Michael Leinartas convinced us that Amazon Linux was a derivative of Redhat rather than Fedora.

Past MVP Caleb Tennis wrote spec tests for the Linux network plugin and provided a new iproute2 plugin for linux. The net-tools package that includes ifconfig is slowly being deprecated in favor the the iproute2 package of tools due to the former not being kept up to date with the newer kernel interfaces. Some Arch Linux users have already seen situations where new systems don’t even have ifconfig installed. The iproute2 tools give us more data as well, such as being able to now capture vlan ids. We default to iproute2 now, which is a pretty big change. Benedikt Böhm helped provide support for peer-to-peer addresses to this plugin. Thanks also go out to Laurent Désarmes for his help testing this patch.

This was an epic effort. For stepping out into the wild untested lands of the linux network plugin and bringing to it tests AND a generational upgrade, Caleb Tennis earns himself a second MVP award. Thanks again Caleb!

Hall of Fame’r Matthew Kent improved filesystem uuid support, fixed the network route spec, and fixed Scientific Linux detection on newer versions of the distribution.

Adam Garside fixed the uptime plugin on OpenBSD.

Jim Meyer and Sean Escriva both quieted some Ruby warnings on 1.9.3 related to old versions of systemu and deprecated use of RbConfig.

Stephen Balukoff fixed the determination of the default interface under newer versions of OpenVZ.

My email inbox also wants to give a shout-out to Paul Morton and Joseph Anthony Pasquale Holsten, who have both been helping garden pull requests and tickets as well as resolving issues. Thanks guys, you’re the best.

Debian packaging is up as well, but make sure you use libohai-ruby1.8=0.6.12-2, as the first release forgot to include a new dependency. We will be merging outstanding patches for Chef 0.10.10 and shipping a beta release soon.

Release Notes

Bug

  • [OHAI-303] – filesystem uuid support
  • [OHAI-308] – Can not detect oracle server linux platform during chef installation
  • [OHAI-311] – Prints warning on Ruby 1.9.3
  • [OHAI-312] – OpenBSD uptime.rb plugin does not generate output
  • [OHAI-314] – plugins/os.rb RbConfig / Config warning in Ruby 1.9.3
  • [OHAI-316] – venet0 IP address detected incorrectly on newer versions of OpenVZ
  • [OHAI-319] – ohai detects “scientific” as “scientificsl”
  • [OHAI-323] – spec failure in sigar/network_route_spec.rb failure
  • [OHAI-331] – Ohai should report Amazon Linux as ‘rhel’ platform family
  • [OHAI-334] – ohai ec2 plugin log claims has_ec2_mac == true all the time

Improvement

  • [OHAI-324] – Add specs for linux network, precursor to some other bug fixes
  • [OHAI-325] – Add support for iproute2 for linux networking
  • [OHAI-338] – Support peer to peer addresses with iproute2 plugin

Bryan McLellan