It’s been a long time coming, so we are pleased to announce that Ohai 0.6.0 is released, including more than 40 bug fixes and improvements. Before getting into the details, I’d like to congratulate this release’s MVP, Kurt Yoder. Kurt really got our Solaris support into shape this release, adding smbios, filesystem, and virtualization support, and contributing to an upgrade of the DMI plugin. Thanks, Kurt!
In addition to Kurt’s fixes, we have two pretty big changes this time around. First of all, we’ve switched Ohai’s JSON backend to YAJL. This is an important step towards switching Chef to YAJL and makes it easier for us to stay current with the version of the JSON gem shipped by package managers in the meantime.
The other big improvement is that we’ve upgraded the command running back end for UNIX-like platforms. As a result, TERM and INT signals sent to Chef will be caught by Chef instead of the command it’s executing, making shutdowns more reliable. This change also results in a nice speed boost as well.
There is not yet a yajl-ruby binary gem for windows available on rubygems.org. This will be coming soon, but in the meantime you can install ohai on Windows using the Ruby Windows Dev Kit. The basic install process is:
[code lang=”plain”]
cscript /nologo C:\chef\wget.vbs http://cloud.github.com/downloads/oneclick/rubyinstaller/DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.1-20101214-1400-sfx.exe %TEMP%\rubydevkit.exe
mkdir C:\DevKit
copy %TEMP%\rubydevkit.exe C:\DevKit
cmd.exe /C C:\DevKit\rubydevkit.exe -y
cmd.exe /C C:\ruby\bin\ruby c:/DevKit/dk.rb init
cmd.exe /C C:\ruby\bin\ruby c:/DevKit/dk.rb install
[/code]
All virtualization plugins now report virtualization software as virtualization[:system] instead of virtualization[:emulator]. Make sure any cookbooks you have that depend on virtualization[:emulator] are upgraded before you upgrade Ohai.
In addition to Kurt’s patches, we also had contributions from Doug MacEachern, Jesai Langenbach, Holger Just, Anshul Khandelwal, Charles Duffy, Lee Huffman, Ringo De Smet, Frank Louwers, Sean Walbran Caleb Tennis, Laurent, Eric Heydrick, Marek, Tollef Fog Heen, and Gordon Thiesfeld–thanks, everyone!