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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Saline (state deployment control and monitoring tool for SUSE Manager/Uyuni) by vizhestkov

Project Description

Saline is an addition for salt used in SUSE Manager/Uyuni aimed to provide better control and visibility for states deploymend in the large scale environments.

In current state the published version can be used only as a Prometheus exporter and missing some of the key features implemented in PoC (not published). Now it can provide metrics related to salt events and state apply process on the minions. But there is no control on this process implemented yet.

Continue with implementation of the missing features and improve the existing implementation:

• authentication (need to decide how it should be/or not related to salt auth)

• web service providing the control of states deployment

Goal for this Hackweek

• Implement missing key features

• Implement the tool for state deployment control with CLI

Resources

https://github.com/openSUSE/saline

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Symbol Relations by hli

Description

There are tools to build function call graphs based on parsing source code, for example, cscope.

This project aims to achieve a similar goal by directly parsing the disasembly (i.e. objdump) of a compiled binary. The assembly code is what the CPU sees, therefore more "direct". This may be useful in certain scenarios, such as gdb/crash debugging.

Detailed description and Demos can be found in the README file:

Supports x86 for now (because my customers only use x86 machines), but support for other architectures can be added easily.

Tested with python3.6

Goals

Any comments are welcome.

Resources

https://github.com/lhb-cafe/SymbolRelations

symrellib.py: mplements the symbol relation graph and the disassembly parser

symrel_tracer*.py: implements tracing (-t option)

symrel.py: "cli parser"

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Run local LLMs with Ollama and explore possible integrations with Uyuni by PSuarezHernandez

Description

Using Ollama you can easily run different LLM models in your local computer. This project is about exploring Ollama, testing different LLMs and try to fine tune them. Also, explore potential ways of integration with Uyuni.

Goals

• Explore Ollama
• Test different models
• Fine tuning
• Explore possible integration in Uyuni

Resources

• https://ollama.com/
• https://huggingface.co/
• https://apeatling.com/articles/part-2-building-your-training-data-for-fine-tuning/

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Make more sense of openQA test results using AI by livdywan

Description

AI has the potential to help with something many of us spend a lot of time doing which is making sense of openQA logs when a job fails.

User Story

Allison Average has a puzzled look on their face while staring at log files that seem to make little sense. Is this a known issue, something completely new or maybe related to infrastructure changes?

Goals

• Leverage a chat interface to help Allison
• Create a model from scratch based on data from openQA
• Proof of concept for automated analysis of openQA test results

Bonus

• Use AI to suggest solutions to merge conflicts
  • This would need a merge conflict editor that can suggest solving the conflict
• Use image recognition for needles

Resources

• TensorFlow
• open-webui
• openQA instance of openSUSE
• openQA documentation

Timeline

Day 1

• Conversing with open-webui to teach me how to create a model based on openQA test results
  • Asking for example code using TensorFlow in Python
  • Discussing log files to explore what to analyze
  • Drafting a new project called Testimony (based on Implementing a containerized Python action) - the project name was also suggested by the assistant

Day 2

• Using NotebookLLM (Gemini) to produce conversational versions of blog posts
  • Writing openQA tests in Python
  • Developing in distrobox containers
• Researching the possibility of creating a project logo with AI
  • Asking open-webui, persons with prior experience and conducting a web search for advice

Highlights

• I briefly tested compared models to see if they would make me more productive. Between llama, gemma and mistral there was no amazing difference in the results for my case.
• Convincing the chat interface to produce code specific to my use case required very explicit instructions.
• Asking for advice on how to use open-webui itself better was frustratingly unfruitful both in trivial and more advanced regards.
• Documentation on source materials used by LLM's and tools for this purpose seems virtually non-existent - specifically if a logo can be generated based on particular licenses

Outcomes

• Chat interface-supported development is providing good starting points and open-webui being open source is more flexible than Gemini. Although currently some fancy features such as grounding and generated podcasts are missing.
• Allison still has to be very experienced with openQA to use a chat interface for test review. Publicly available system prompts would make that easier, though.

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Integrate Backstage with Rancher Manager by nwmacd

Description

Backstage (backstage.io) is an open-source, CNCF project that allows you to create your own developer portal. There are many plugins for Backstage.

This could be a great compliment to Rancher Manager.

Goals

Learn and experiment with Backstage and look at how this could be integrated with Rancher Manager. Goal is to have some kind of integration completed in this Hack week.

Progress

Screen shot of home page at the end of Hackweek:

Day One

• Got Backstage running locally, understanding configuration with HTTPs.
• Got Backstage embedded in an IFRAME inside of Rancher
• Added content into the software catalog (see: https://backstage.io/docs/features/techdocs/getting-started/)
• Understood more about the entity model

Day Two

• Connected Backstage to the Rancher local cluster and configured the Kubernetes plugin.
• Created Rancher theme to make the light theme more consistent with Rancher

Days Three and Day Four

• Created two backend plugins for Backstage:

  1. Catalog Entity Provider - this imports users from Rancher into Backstage
  2. Auth Provider - uses the proxied sign-in pattern to check the Rancher session cookie, to user that to authenticate the user with Rancher and then log them into Backstage by connecting this to the imported User entity from the catalog entity provider plugin.

• With this in place, you can single-sign-on between Rancher and Backstage when it is deployed within Rancher. Note this is only when running locally for development at present

Day Five

• Start to build out a production deployment for all of the above
• Made some progress, but hit issues with the authentication and proxying when running proxied within Rancher, which needs further investigation

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Extending KubeVirtBMC's capability by adding Redfish support by zchang

Description

In Hack Week 23, we delivered a project called KubeBMC (renamed to KubeVirtBMC now), which brings the good old-fashioned IPMI ways to manage virtual machines running on KubeVirt-powered clusters. This opens the possibility of integrating existing bare-metal provisioning solutions like Tinkerbell with virtualized environments. We even received an inquiry about transferring the project to the KubeVirt organization. So, a proposal was filed, which was accepted by the KubeVirt community, and the project was renamed after that. We have many tasks on our to-do list. Some of them are administrative tasks; some are feature-related. One of the most requested features is Redfish support.

Goals

Extend the capability of KubeVirtBMC by adding Redfish support. Currently, the virtbmc component only exposes IPMI endpoints. We need to implement another simulator to expose Redfish endpoints, as we did with the IPMI module. We aim at a basic set of functionalities:

• Power management
• Boot device selection
• Virtual media mount (this one is not so basic )

Resources

• DMTF/Redfish-Interface-Emulator: The Redfish Interface Emulator can emulate a Redfish-based interface statically (GET) or dynamically (POST, PATCH, DELETE)

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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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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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