# Chef Client Doc Changes: ### --validator option for `knife client create` Boolean value. If set to true, knife creates a validator client o.w. it creates a user client. Default is false. ### --delete-validators for `knife client delete` Option that is required to be specified if user is attempting to delete a validator client. No effect while deleting a user client. ### --delete-validators for `knife client bulk delete` Option that is required to be specified if user is attempting to delete a validator client. If not specified users cannot delete a client if it's validator client. If specified knife asks users for confirmation of deleting clients and validator clients seperately. Some examples for scripting: To delete all non-validator clients: `knife client bulk delete regexp --yes` To delete all clients including validators: `knife client bulk delete regexp --delete-validators --yes` ### -r / --runlist option for chef-client Option similar to `-o` which sets or changes the run_list of a node permanently. ### OHAI 7 Upgrade Unless there are major issues, 11.12.0 will include OHAI 7. We already have ohai 7 docs in place. We probably need to add some notes to ohai 6 notes that one should now use the newer version when possible. ### New knife command: `knife ssl check [URI]` The `knife ssl check` command is used to check or troubleshoot SSL configuration. When run without arguments, it tests whether chef/knife can verify the Chef server's SSL certificate. Otherwise it connects to the server specified by the given URL. Examples: * Check knife's configuration against the chef-server: `knife ssl check` * Check chef-client's configuration: `knife ssl check -c /etc/chef/client.rb` * Check whether an external server's SSL certificate can be verified: `knife ssl check https://www.getchef.com` ### New knife command: `knife ssl fetch [URI]` The `knife ssl fetch` command is used to copy certificates from an HTTPS server to the `trusted_certs_dir` of knife or `chef-client`. If the certificates match the hostname of the remote server, this command is all that is required for knife or chef-client to verify the remote server in the future. WARNING: `knife` has no way to determine whether the certificates were tampered with in transit. If that happens, knife/chef-client will trust potentially forged/malicious certificates until they are deleted from the `trusted_certs_dir`. Users are *VERY STRONGLY* encouraged to verify the authenticity of the certificates downloaded with `knife fetch` by some trustworthy means. Examples: * Fetch the chef server's certificates for use with knife: `knife ssl fetch` * Fetch the chef server's certificates for use with chef-client: `knife ssl fetch -c /etc/chef/client.rb` * Fetch the certificates from an arbitrary server: `knife ssl fetch https://www.getchef.com` ### OpenSUSE and SUSE differentiation With the recent change in OHAI to differentiate between SUSE (or SLES - SUSE Enterprise Linux Server) and OpenSUSE we need to update our docs to reflect following (quoting btm): * Platform SUSE should be changed to OpenSUSE everywhere that it previously meant OpenSUSE but said SUSE. * Keeping SLES as platform SUSE is still a bit confusing, but that's the least horrible path we chose. * It's all still very confusing. :) This page is an example but we probably want to search for `suse` in our doc repo and see if there is anywhere else. http://docs.opscode.com/dsl_recipe_method_platform_family.html ### Cron Resource The weekday attribute now accepts the weekday as a symbol, e.g. :monday or :thursday. The new time attribute takes special time values specified by cron as a symbol, such as :reboot or :monthly. ### SSL Verification Warnings Chef 11.12 emits verbose warnings when configured to not verify SSL certificates. Though not verifying certificates is currently the default setting, this is unsecure and a future release of Chef will change the default setting so that SSL certificates are verified. Users are encouraged to resolve these warnings by adding the following to their configuration files (client.rb or solo.rb): `ssl_verify_mode :verify_peer` This setting will check that the certificate presented by HTTPS servers is signed by a trusted authority. By default, the on-premises Enterprise Chef and Open Source Chef server use a self-signed certificate that chef-client will not be able to verify, which will result in SSL errors when connecting to the server. To check SSL connectivity with the server, users can use the `knife ssl check` command. If the server is configured to use an untrusted self-signed certificate, users can configure chef-client to trust the remote server by copying the server's certificate to the `trusted_certs_dir`. The `knife ssl fetch` command can be used to automate this process; however, `knife` is not able to determine whether certificates downloaded with `knife ssl fetch` have been tampered with during the download, so users should verify the authenticity of any certificates downloaded this way. If a user absolutely cannot enable certificate verification and wishes to suppress SSL warnings, they can use HTTP instead of HTTPS as a workaround. This is highly discouraged. If some behavior of Chef prevents a user from enabling SSL certificate verification, they are encouraged to file a bug report. ### New Configuration Option: `local_key_generation` Chef 11.x servers support client-side generation of keys when creating new clients. Generating the keys on the client provides two benefits: 1) the private key never travels over the network, which improves security; 2) the CPU load imposed by key creation is moved to the node and distributed, which allows the server to handle more concurrent client registrations. For compatibility reasons, this feature is opt-in, but will likely be the default or even only behavior in Chef 12. To enable it, add this to client.rb before running chef-client on a node for the first time: ``` local_key_generation true ``` The default value of this setting is `false` *NOTE:* Chef servers that implement the 10.x API do not support this feature. Enabling this on a client that connects to a 10.X API server will cause client registration to silently fail. Don't do it.