[[chef-dev]] [Announcement] Chef 0.9.8 Beta Gems Available

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

Ohai Chefs!

I'm happy to announce that Chef 0.9.8 is now available as a beta gem for
testing.

# Chef 0.9.8 Highlights

Chef 0.9.8 has so many improvements, it is tough for me to keep track of them,
let alone pick the best ones to highlight. Here's a small selection of
the changes
included in 0.9.8:

* Knife bootstrap can be customized with templates
* Execute provider support for Windows
* Knife cookbook site share/unshare
* Improved knife help and command output
* Saves the expanded run list and role list to automatic attributes
* Removed Merb's process management, include chef-server and chef-server-webui
  in the process name
* Explain auth failures due to unsynchronized clocks in 401 errors
* Don't ever save the node with incomplete attributes
* Improve recovery from RabbitMQ restarts
* Improved knife help output

A more exhaustive (though slightly inaccurate at the moment) list of changes
can be found here:

http://tickets.opscode.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&version=10079

# Upgrading Chef Clients
Clients should be compatible with any 0.9.x server. To test chef-client 0.9.8,
simply upgrade the gem. You need to add the prerelease flag to the `gem`
command:

    gem install chef --pre

# Upgrading Chef Servers
When upgrading the server, you need the latest version of 
mixlib-authentication
in addition to the chef-server gems:

    gem install mixlib-authentication --pre
    gem install chef-server-api --pre
    gem install chef-server-webui --pre

There are a few changes in the server to be aware of. Firstly, we have
configured merb not to fork a separate master and worker process, so you'll
only see one merb process each for chef-server-api and chef-server-webui.
Second, we have added 'chef-server (api)' and 'chef-server-webui' to the
process name set by merb. Putting the two together, you can expect your 
process
listing to look like this:

    $ ps ax |grep merb
    70134 s004 S+ 0:04.77 merb : chef-server (api) : worker (port 4000)
    70042 s005 R+ 0:06.32 merb : chef-server-webui : worker (port 4040)

Be sure to update any process management scripts you may have that depend on
the format of the process listing.

# Submitting Feedback
As always, your testing and feedback is invaluable. You can contact us with 
bug
reports, suggestions, or to ask for help on irc.freenode.net#chef, and this
mailing list. Please report any bugs you find on our JIRA at
http://tickets.opscode.com/

Keep those patches coming!

Daniel DeLeo