Author:
Adam Leff
Former Chef Employee
2017 InSpec Year in Review
By Adam Leff
2017 has been an incredible year for InSpec; the community continues to grow and the project continues to evolve in amazing ways. As the year winds down, I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on our collective accomplishments.
Read moreEveryday Compliance with InSpec
By Adam Leff
As National Cyber Security Awareness Month comes to a close, it’s a great opportunity for all of us to make security and compliance part of our daily routine. I know, I know…no one thinks about “compliance” and gets excited. However, taking advantage of tools like InSpec can help us conquer everyday compliance with ease.
Read moreGuest Blog Post: Ensuring Agent Compliance with Chef Automate
By Adam Leff
Besides helping ensure compliance with regulatory standards, InSpec is a great solution for detecting compliance with your organization’s own rules and expectations. Our friends at Jack Henry & Associates Inc. recently detected and corrected an issue in their environment thanks to the power of InSpec and Chef Automate.
Read moreUnderstanding InSpec Profile Inheritance
By Adam Leff
Engineers sometimes use the phrase DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. It’s commonly used when writing or reviewing code that is repetitive. The usual solution is to take the repetitious code and turn it into something that can be reused. It’s really easy to fall into the “repeat yourself” trap, even with a tool like InSpec.
Read moreAwesome Community Chefs – 2017 Award Winners
By Adam Leff
Everyone who participates in the Chef Community does exceptional things on a regular basis. This work is worthy of celebration and stands as a testament to the way our community comes together to ensure all members are successful, together.
Read moreDetecting the WannaCry Exploit with InSpec
By Adam Leff
As you may have read about in the news, an exploit called “WannaCry” has been circulating and infecting Windows systems across the globe. The “WannaCry” exploit is a particularly nasty type of exploit called “ransomware”; once installed, the malware encrypts your files and holds them hostage until you pay hundreds of dollars in ransom fees.
Read moreInSpec, Habitat, and Continuous Compliance
By Adam Leff
In my last post, I talked about some of the benefits of containers, how containers can complicate compliance requirements, and how InSpec can help. InSpec provides a human-readable infrastructure and compliance testing language that allows you to scan your hosts, VMs, and containers to ensure your fleet’s compliance. But let’s take this one step further.
Read moreDocker Container Compliance with InSpec
By Adam Leff
Thanks to its speed and approachability, Docker has done a great deal to make containers popular. Need a quick Redis server? docker run redis and boom, you’ve got a Redis server. However, compared to traditional hosts and virtual machines, containers are considerably more difficult to reason about.
Read moreUsing Chef with VMware vRealize Orchestrator
By Adam Leff
Recently, VMware announced the general availability of their VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) plugin for Chef (formerly vCenter Orchestrator). This plugin offers a number of vRO workflows for interacting with the Chef Server (such as modifying nodes and environments) and bootstrapping new nodes with support for both Linux and Windows nodes.
Read moreManaging Red Hat Subscriptions with Chef
By Adam Leff
Keeping your Red Hat systems patched is critical, and registering your nodes with Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) or a Red Hat Satellite is the first step. Frequently, users will handle the registration manually or bake it in to their nodes with a one-time startup script.
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