Rudder 6.2 release notes

What’s new?

Following our new versioning scheme, 6.2 is a minor release that improves the 6.X branch while avoiding architecture changes to provide a straightforward upgrade process and ensure reliability.

But make no mistake, it’s a minor release that comes with major user experience improvements!

UI

  • Configurable columns in node list (yes, that’s what you think!). You can display properties values, inventory data like any software version, IP addresses, etc.

  • Directives and Settings pages are greatly improved.

  • The look of most pages has been improved and made more consistent.

CVE plugin

  • New view by node to visualize the state of known vulnerabilities on individual nodes.

  • Tracking and graphing of vulnerability remediation over time.

  • More generally, the plugin is now well tested and ready for production use.

Health check

Ever wondered how your Rudder server was going or why it started slowing down? The health check will make it easy with:

  • An API endpoint for precise monitoring.

  • Dedicated page for easy visualization.

  • Notifications in the menu bar not to miss important stuff.

Plugins management

  • Automated plugin upgrade. No more incompatible or disabled plugins after upgrade! (if your server has access to the download server).

  • Rudder instances behind proxies will now be able to download plugins and use external APIs through your proxy.

Platforms

Windows

  • Windows agent is now capable of applying DSC configurations directly. You can either use a source file that the agent will compile and apply, or directly apply a compiled state (in MOF format). In both cases the outcome will be reported in Rudder like any other component.

  • The great Chocolatey software management tool is now supported, allowing easier software management automation.

Unix

  • Solaris support has been added: packaged agent, ips package manager, service management, etc.

  • AIX now supports the nim package manager in addition to yum/rpm.

  • Augeas is now embedded (or installed as a dependency), to allow powerful file editions with a lot of pre-defined configuration file formats.

Docker/Containers

  • A technical preview for production Rudder relay running in read-only unprivileged containers is now available. This is a first step before working on the root server too, we’d love to get feedback if you want to try it!

Inventory hooks

New hooks for inventory reception on the server are added, allowing to trigger automated acceptation process or to notify about a broken inventory.

Installing, upgrading and testing

Supported operating systems

This version provides packages for these operating systems:

  • Rudder server and Rudder relay: Debian 9-10, RHEL/CentOS 7-8 (64 bits), SLES 12-15, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and 20.04 LTS

  • Rudder agent: all of the above plus Debian 8, RHEL/CentOS 6, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

  • Rudder agent (binary packages available with a subscription) : Debian 5-7, RHEL/CentOS 3-5, SLES 10-11, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS-12.04 LTS-13.04-15.10, Windows Server 2008R2-2019, AIX 5-6-7, Solaris 10 & 11, Slackware 14

Read more about supported operating systems in the documentation.