Testing and adding GNU/Linux distributions on Uyuni by juliogonzalezgil

Join the Gitter channel! https://gitter.im/uyuni-project/hackweek

Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines. It also manages configuration, can run audits, build image containers, monitor and much more!

Currently there are a few distributions that are completely untested on Uyuni or SUSE Manager (AFAIK) or just not tested since a long time, and could be interesting knowing how hard would be working with them and, if possible, fix whatever is broken.

For newcomers, the easiest distributions are those based on DEB or RPM packages. Distributions with other package formats are doable, but will require adapting the Python and Java code to be able to sync and analyze such packages (and if salt does not support those packages, it will need changes as well). So if you want a distribution with other packages, make sure you are comfortable handling such changes.

No developer experience? No worries! We had non-developers contributors in the past, and we are ready to help as long as you are willing to learn. If you don't want to code at all, you can also help us preparing the documentation after someone else has the initial code ready, or you could also help with testing :-)

The idea is testing Salt and Salt-ssh clients, but NOT traditional clients, which are deprecated.

To consider that a distribution has basic support, we should cover at least (points 3-6 are to be tested for both salt minions and salt ssh minions):

1. Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
2. Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap scritp, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator)
3. Package management (install, remove, update...)
4. Patching
5. Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
6. Salt remote commands
7. Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
8. Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
9. Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)
10. Bonus point: testsuite enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/tree/master/testsuite)

If something is breaking: we can try to fix it, but the main idea is research how supported it is right now. Beyond that it's up to each project member how much to hack :-)

• If you don't have knowledge about some of the steps: ask the team
• If you still don't know what to do: switch to another distribution and keep testing.

This card is for EVERYONE, not just developers. Seriously! We had people from other teams helping that were not developers, and added support for Debian and new SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap versions :-)

Pending

FUSS

FUSS is a complete GNU/Linux solution (server, client and desktop/standalone) based on Debian for managing an educational network.

https://fuss.bz.it/

Seems to be a Debian 12 derivative, so adding it could be quite easy.

• [W] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file)
• [W] Onboarding (salt minion from UI, salt minion from bootstrap script, and salt-ssh minion) (this will probably require adding OS to the bootstrap repository creator) --> Working for all 3 options (salt minion UI, salt minion bootstrap script and salt-ssh minion from the UI).
• [W] Package management (install, remove, update...) --> Installing a new package works, needs to test the rest.
• [I] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). No patches detected. Do we support patches for Debian at all?
• [W] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [W] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement

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SUSE AI Meets the Game Board by moio

Use tabletopgames.ai’s open source TAG and PyTAG frameworks to apply Statistical Forward Planning and Deep Reinforcement Learning to two board games of our own design. On an all-green, all-open source, all-AWS stack!

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Results: Infrastructure Achievements

We successfully built and automated a containerized stack to support our AI experiments. This included:

• a Fully-Automated, One-Command, GPU-accelerated Kubernetes setup: we created an OpenTofu based script, tofu-tag, to deploy SUSE's RKE2 Kubernetes running on CUDA-enabled nodes in AWS, powered by openSUSE with GPU drivers and gpu-operator
• Containerization of the TAG and PyTAG frameworks: TAG (Tabletop AI Games) and PyTAG were patched for seamless deployment in containerized environments. We automated the container image creation process with GitHub Actions. Our forks (PRs upstream upcoming):
  • https://github.com/moio/TabletopGames/tree/hackweek24
  • https://github.com/moio/PyTAG/tree/hackweek24

./deploy.sh and voilà - Kubernetes running PyTAG (k9s, above) with GPU acceleration (nvtop, below)

Results: Game Design Insights

Our project focused on modeling and analyzing two card games of our own design within the TAG framework:

• Game Modeling: We implemented models for Dario's "Bamboo" and Silvio's "Totoro" and "R3" games, enabling AI agents to play thousands of games ...in minutes!
• AI-driven optimization: By analyzing statistical data on moves, strategies, and outcomes, we iteratively tweaked the game mechanics and rules to achieve better balance and player engagement.
• Advanced analytics: Leveraging AI agents with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and random action selection, we compared performance metrics to identify optimal strategies and uncover opportunities for game refinement .
  • more about Bamboo on Dario's site
  • more about R3 on Silvio's site (italian, translation coming)
  • more about Totoro on Silvio's site

A family picture of our card games in progress. From the top: Bamboo, Totoro, R3

Results: Learning, Collaboration, and Innovation

Beyond technical accomplishments, the project showcased innovative approaches to coding, learning, and teamwork:

• "Trio programming" with AI assistance: Our "trio programming" approach—two developers and GitHub Copilot—was a standout success, especially in handling slightly-repetitive but not-quite-exactly-copypaste tasks. Java as a language tends to be verbose and we found it to be fitting particularly well.
• AI tools for reporting and documentation: We extensively used AI chatbots to streamline writing and reporting. (Including writing this report! ...but this note was added manually during edit!)
• GPU compute expertise: Overcoming challenges with CUDA drivers and cloud infrastructure deepened our understanding of GPU-accelerated workloads in the open-source ecosystem.
• Game design as a learning platform: By blending AI techniques with creative game design, we learned not only about AI strategies but also about making games fun, engaging, and balanced.

Last but not least we had a lot of fun! ...and this was definitely not a chatbot generated line!

The Context: AI + Board Games

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Rancher/k8s Trouble-Maker by tonyhansen

Project Description

When studying for my RHCSA, I found trouble-maker, which is a program that breaks a Linux OS and requires you to fix it. I want to create something similar for Rancher/k8s that can allow for troubleshooting an unknown environment.

Goal for this Hackweek

Create a basic framework for creating Rancher/k8s cluster lab environments as needed for the Break/Fix Create at least 5 modules that can be applied to the cluster and require troubleshooting

Resources

https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2 https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up

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terraform-provider-feilong by e_bischoff

Project Description

People need to test operating systems and applications on s390 platform.

Installation from scratch solutions include:

• just deploy and provision manually (with the help of ftpboot script, if you are at SUSE)
• use s3270 terminal emulation (used by openQA people?)
• use LXC from IBM to start CP commands and analyze the results
• use zPXE to do some PXE-alike booting (used by the orthos team?)
• use tessia to install from scratch using autoyast
• use libvirt for s390 to do some nested virtualization on some already deployed z/VM system
• directly install a Linux kernel on a LPAR and use kvm + libvirt from there

Deployment from image solutions include:

• use ICIC web interface (openstack in disguise, contributed by IBM)
• use ICIC from the openstack terraform provider (used by Rancher QA)
• use zvm_ansible to control SMAPI
• connect directly to SMAPI low-level socket interface

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center (ICIC) harnesses the Feilong API, but you can use Feilong without installing ICIC, provided you set up a "z/VM cloud connector" into one of your VMs following this schema.

What about writing a terraform Feilong provider, just like we have the terraform libvirt provider? That would allow to transparently call Feilong from your main.tf files to deploy and destroy resources on your system/z.

Other Feilong-based solutions include:

• make libvirt Feilong-aware
• simply call Feilong from shell scripts with curl
• use zvmconnector client python library from Feilong
• use zthin part of Feilong to directly command SMAPI.

Goal for Hackweek 23

My final goal is to be able to easily deploy and provision VMs automatically on a z/VM system, in a way that people might enjoy even outside of SUSE.

My technical preference is to write a terraform provider plugin, as it is the approach that involves the least software components for our deployments, while remaining clean, and compatible with our existing development infrastructure.

Goals for Hackweek 24

Feilong provider works and is used internally by SUSE Manager team. Let's push it forward!

Let's add support for fiberchannel disks and multipath.

Goals for Hackweek 25

• Finish support for fiberchannel disks and multipath
• Fix problems with registration on hashicorp providers registry

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Contribute to terraform-provider-libvirt by pinvernizzi

Description

The SUSE Manager (SUMA) teams' main tool for infrastructure automation, Sumaform, largely relies on terraform-provider-libvirt. That provider is also widely used by other teams, both inside and outside SUSE.

It would be good to help the maintainers of this project and give back to the community around it, after all the amazing work that has been already done.

If you're interested in any of infrastructure automation, Terraform, virtualization, tooling development, Go (...) it is also a good chance to learn a bit about them all by putting your hands on an interesting, real-use-case and complex project.

Goals

• Get more familiar with Terraform provider development and libvirt bindings in Go
• Solve some issues and/or implement some features
• Get in touch with the community around the project

Resources

• CONTRIBUTING readme
• Go libvirt library in use by the project
• Terraform plugin development
• "Good first issue" list

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Small healthcheck tool for Longhorn by mbrookhuis

Project Description

We have often problems (e.g. pods not starting) that are related to PVCs not running, cluster (nodes) not all up or deployments not running or completely running. This all prevents administration activities. Having something that can regular be run to validate the status of the cluster would be helpful, and not as of today do a lot of manual tasks.

As addition (read enough time), we could add changing reservation, adding new disks, etc. --> This didn't made it. But the scripts can easily be adopted.

This tool would decrease troubleshooting time, giving admins rights to the rancher GUI and could be used in automation.

Goal for this Hackweek

At the end we should have a small python tool that is doing a (very) basic health check on nodes, deployments and PVCs. First attempt was to make it in golang, but that was taking to much time.

Overview

This tool will run a simple healthcheck on a kubernetes cluster. It will perform the following actions:

• node check: This will check all nodes, and display the status and the k3s version. If the status of the nodes is not "Ready" (this should be only reported), the cluster will be reported as having problems

• deployment check: This check will list all deployments, and display the number of expected replicas and the used replica. If there are unused replicas this will be displayed. The cluster will be reported as having problems.

• pvc check: This check will list of all pvc's, and display the status and the robustness. If the robustness is not "Healthy", the cluster will be reported as having problems.

If there is a problem registered in the checks, there will be a warning that the cluster is not healthy and the program will exit with 1.

The script has 1 mandatory parameter and that is the kubeconf of the cluster or of a node off the cluster.

The code is writen for Python 3.11, but will also work on 3.6 (the default with SLES15.x). There is a venv present that will contain all needed packages. Also, the script can be run on the cluster itself or any other linux server.

Installation

To install this project, perform the following steps:

• Create the directory /opt/k8s-check

mkdir /opt/k8s-check

• Copy all the file to this directory and make the following changes:

chmod +x k8s-check.py

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Metrics Server viewer for Kubernetes by bkampen

This project is finished please visit the github repo below for the tool.

Description

Build a CLI tools which can visualize Kubernetes metrics from the metrics-server, so you're able to watch these without installing Prometheus and Grafana on a cluster.

Goals

• Learn more about metrics-server
• Learn more about the inner workings of Kubernetes.
• Learn more about Go

Resources

https://github.com/bvankampen/metrics-viewer

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ClusterOps - Easily install and manage your personal kubernetes cluster by andreabenini

Description

ClusterOps is a Kubernetes installer and operator designed to streamline the initial configuration and ongoing maintenance of kubernetes clusters. The focus of this project is primarily on personal or local installations. However, the goal is to expand its use to encompass all installations of Kubernetes for local development purposes.
It simplifies cluster management by automating tasks and providing just one user-friendly YAML-based configuration config.yml.

Overview

• Simplified Configuration: Define your desired cluster state in a simple YAML file, and ClusterOps will handle the rest.
• Automated Setup: Automates initial cluster configuration, including network settings, storage provisioning, special requirements (for example GPUs) and essential components installation.
• Ongoing Maintenance: Performs routine maintenance tasks such as upgrades, security updates, and resource monitoring.
• Extensibility: Easily extend functionality with custom plugins and configurations.
• Self-Healing: Detects and recovers from common cluster issues, ensuring stability, idempotence and reliability. Same operation can be performed multiple times without changing the result.
• Discreet: It works only on what it knows, if you are manually configuring parts of your kubernetes and this configuration does not interfere with it you can happily continue to work on several parts and use this tool only for what is needed.

Features

• distribution and engine independence. Install your favorite kubernetes engine with your package manager, execute one script and you'll have a complete working environment at your disposal.
  
• Basic config approach. One single config.yml file with configuration requirements (add/remove features): human readable, plain and simple. All fancy configs managed automatically (ingress, balancers, services, proxy, ...).
• Local Builtin ContainerHub. The default installation provides a fully configured ContainerHub available locally along with the kubernetes installation. This configuration allows the user to build, upload and deploy custom container images as they were provided from external sources. Internet public sources are still available but local development can be kept in this localhost server. Builtin ClusterOps operator will be fetched from this ContainerHub registry too.
• Kubernetes official dashboard installed as a plugin, others planned too (k9s for example).
• Kubevirt plugin installed and properly configured. Unleash the power of classic virtualization (KVM+QEMU) on top of Kubernetes and manage your entire system from there, libvirtd and virsh libs are required.
• One operator to rule them all. The installation script configures your machine automatically during installation and adds one kubernetes operator to manage your local cluster. From there the operator takes care of the cluster on your behalf.
• Clean installation and removal. Just test it, when you are done just use the same program to uninstall everything without leaving configs (or pods) behind.

Planned features (Wishlist / TODOs)

• Containerized Data Importer (CDI). Persistent storage management add-on for Kubernetes to provide a declarative way of building and importing Virtual Machine Disks on PVCs for

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Harvester Packer Plugin by mrohrich

Description

Hashicorp Packer is an automation tool that allows automatic customized VM image builds - assuming the user has a virtualization tool at their disposal. To make use of Harvester as such a virtualization tool a plugin for Packer needs to be written. With this plugin users could make use of their Harvester cluster to build customized VM images, something they likely want to do if they have a Harvester cluster.

Goals

Write a Packer plugin bridging the gap between Harvester and Packer. Users should be able to create customized VM images using Packer and Harvester with no need to utilize another virtualization platform.

Resources

Hashicorp documentation for building custom plugins for Packer https://developer.hashicorp.com/packer/docs/plugins/creation/custom-builders

Source repository of the Harvester Packer plugin https://github.com/m-ildefons/harvester-packer-plugin

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Learn enough Golang and hack on CoreDNS by jkuzilek

Description

I'm implementing a split-horizon DNS for my home Kubernetes cluster to be able to access my internal (and external) services over the local network through public domains. I managed to make a PoC with the k8s_gateway plugin for CoreDNS. However, I soon found out it responds with IPs for all Gateways assigned to HTTPRoutes, publishing public IPs as well as the internal Loadbalancer ones.

To remedy this issue, a simple filtering mechanism has to be implemented.

Goals

• Learn an acceptable amount of Golang
• Implement GatewayClass (and IngressClass) filtering for k8s_gateway
• Deploy on homelab cluster
• Profit?

Resources

• https://github.com/ori-edge/k8s_gateway/issues/36
• https://github.com/coredns/coredns/issues/2465#issuecomment-593910983

EDIT: Feature mostly complete. An unfinished PR lies here. Successfully tested working on homelab cluster.

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