mgr-ansible-ssh - Intelligent, Lightweight CLI for Distributed Remote Execution by deve5h

Description

By the end of Hack Week, the target will be to deliver a minimal functional version 1 (MVP) of a custom command-line tool named mgr-ansible-ssh (a unified wrapper for BOTH ad-hoc shell & playbooks) that allows operators to:

1. Execute arbitrary shell commands on thousand of remote machines simultaneously using Ansible Runner with artifacts saved locally.
2. Pass runtime options such as inventory file, remote command string/ playbook execution, parallel forks, limits, dry-run mode, or no-std-ansible-output.
3. Leverage existing SSH trust relationships without additional setup.
4. Provide a clean, intuitive CLI interface with --help for ease of use. It should provide consistent UX & CI-friendly interface.
5. Establish a foundation that can later be extended with advanced features such as logging, grouping, interactive shell mode, safe-command checks, and parallel execution tuning.

The MVP should enable day-to-day operations to efficiently target thousands of machines with a single, consistent interface.

Goals

Primary Goals (MVP):

Build a functional CLI tool (mgr-ansible-ssh) capable of executing shell commands on multiple remote hosts using Ansible Runner. Test the tool across a large distributed environment (1000+ machines) to validate its performance and reliability.

Looking forward to significantly reducing the zypper deployment time across all 351 RMT VM servers in our MLM cluster by eliminating the dependency on the taskomatic service, bringing execution down to a fraction of the current duration. The tool should also support multiple runtime flags, such as:

mgr-ansible-ssh: Remote command execution wrapper using Ansible Runner

Usage: mgr-ansible-ssh [--help] [--version] [--inventory INVENTORY]
                   [--run RUN] [--playbook PLAYBOOK] [--limit LIMIT]
                   [--forks FORKS] [--dry-run] [--no-ansible-output]

Required Arguments
--inventory, -i      Path to Ansible inventory file to use

Any One of the Arguments Is Required
--run, -r            Execute the specified shell command on target hosts
--playbook, -p       Execute the specified Ansible playbook on target hosts

Optional Arguments
--help, -h           Show the help message and exit
--version, -v        Show the version and exit
--limit, -l          Limit execution to specific hosts or groups
--forks, -f          Number of parallel Ansible forks
--dry-run            Run in Ansible check mode (requires -p or --playbook)
--no-ansible-output  Suppress Ansible stdout output

Secondary/Stretched Goals (if time permits):

1. Add pretty output formatting (success/failure summary per host).
2. Implement basic logging of executed commands and results.
3. Introduce safety checks for risky commands (shutdown, rm -rf, etc.).
4. Package the tool so it can be installed with pip or stored internally.

Resources

Collaboration is welcome from anyone interested in CLI tooling, automation, or distributed systems. Skills that would be particularly valuable include:

1. Python especially around CLI dev (argparse, click, rich)

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Uyuni Health-check Grafana AI Troubleshooter by ygutierrez

Description

This project explores the feasibility of using the open-source Grafana LLM plugin to enhance the Uyuni Health-check tool with LLM capabilities. The idea is to integrate a chat-based "AI Troubleshooter" directly into existing dashboards, allowing users to ask natural-language questions about errors, anomalies, or performance issues.

Goals

• Investigate if and how the grafana-llm-app plug-in can be used within the Uyuni Health-check tool.
• Investigate if this plug-in can be used to query LLMs for troubleshooting scenarios.
• Evaluate support for local LLMs and external APIs through the plugin.
• Evaluate if and how the Uyuni MCP server could be integrated as another source of information.

Resources

Grafana LMM plug-in

Uyuni Health-check

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Uyuni read-only replica by cbosdonnat

Description

For now, there is no possible HA setup for Uyuni. The idea is to explore setting up a read-only shadow instance of an Uyuni and make it as useful as possible.

Possible things to look at:

• live sync of the database, probably using the WAL. Some of the tables may have to be skipped or some features disabled on the RO instance (taskomatic, PXT sessions…)
• Can we use a load balancer that routes read-only queries to either instance and the other to the RW one? For example, packages or PXE data can be served by both, the API GET requests too. The rest would be RW.

Goals

• Prepare a document explaining how to do it.
• PR with the needed code changes to support it

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Enable more features in mcp-server-uyuni by j_renner

Description

I would like to contribute to mcp-server-uyuni, the MCP server for Uyuni / Multi-Linux Manager) exposing additional features as tools. There is lots of relevant features to be found throughout the API, for example:

• System operations and infos
• System groups
• Maintenance windows
• Ansible
• Reporting
• ...

At the end of the week I managed to enable basic system group operations:

• List all system groups visible to the user
• Create new system groups
• List systems assigned to a group
• Add and remove systems from groups

Goals

• Set up test environment locally with the MCP server and client + a recent MLM server [DONE]
• Identify features and use cases offering a benefit with limited effort required for enablement [DONE]
• Create a PR to the repo [DONE]

Resources

• MCP Server Uyuni
• MLM API Docs

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Uyuni Saltboot rework by oholecek

Description

When Uyuni switched over to the containerized proxies we had to abandon salt based saltboot infrastructure we had before. Uyuni already had integration with a Cobbler provisioning server and saltboot infra was re-implemented on top of this Cobbler integration.

What was not obvious from the start was that Cobbler, having all it's features, woefully slow when dealing with saltboot size environments. We did some improvements in performance, introduced transactions, and generally tried to make this setup usable. However the underlying slowness remained.

Goals

This project is not something trying to invent new things, it is just finally implementing saltboot infrastructure directly with the Uyuni server core.

Instead of generating grub and pxelinux configurations by Cobbler for all thousands of systems and branches, we will provide a GET access point to retrieve grub or pxelinux file during the boot:

/saltboot/group/grub/$fqdn and similar for systems /saltboot/system/grub/$mac

Next we adapt our tftpd translator to query these points when asked for default or mac based config.

Lastly similar thing needs to be done on our apache server when HTTP UEFI boot is used.

Resources

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