In this post, we’re going to look at how easy it is to get up and running with a Chef Server on a brand new Ubuntu 12.04 or CentOS 6.3 system. We’ll also explore the new Chef Server management tool, chef-server-ctl, and the new configuration file.

Another week, another tale of some Awesome Chefs in our Community doing big things with Chef. This time, the story comes from right here in Opscode’s backyard of Seattle.

We’re heading into our second annual user conference and we couldn’t be more excited about our speaker lineup and sponsoring partners. But, before I get into all that, please remember Early Bird Pricing ends March 10th, so register today!

It has been an eventful February here at Opscode.  As many of you know, on February 4th, we announced that Facebook is using Private Chef to automate the configuration and management of its web-tier infrastructure. That is some hefty validation of Chef at dramatic scale.

More customer awesomeness today, this time from our friends at Getaroom, who make finding the best rates on hotels anywhere in the world fast and easy.

This release includes a few important security fixes. Solr Security Fix The default solr configuration has some tunables that are enabled for updating data and debugging that provide a remote attack surface. The configuration in this release disables those features.

The Chef 11 Server provides significant improvements in terms of compute efficiency, scalability, and operability. We achieved these improvements by rewriting the API server in Erlang and switching the data store from CouchDB to PostgreSQL.

We have a release today for both the 11.x and 10.x Chef Client tracks. This release is compatible with the changes in the recent 1.7.7 release of the JSON gem that worked around a DoS vulnerability by disabling the create_additions option by default.

Here’s a quick list of the Opscode-related events going on this week.