The Agentic Rancher Experiment: Do Androids Dream of Electric Cattle? by moio

Rancher is a beast of a codebase. Let's investigate if the new 2025 generation of GitHub Autonomous Coding Agents and Copilot Workspaces can actually tame it.

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The Plan

Create a sandbox GitHub Organization, clone in key Rancher repositories, and let the AI loose to see if it can handle real-world enterprise OSS maintenance - or if it just hallucinates new breeds of Kubernetes resources!

Specifically, throw "Agentic Coders" some typical tasks in a complex, long-lived open-source project, such as:

❥ The Grunt Work: generate missing GoDocs, unit tests, and refactorings. Rebase PRs.

❥ The Complex Stuff: fix actual (historical) bugs and feature requests to see if they can traverse the complexity without (too much) human hand-holding.

❥ Hunting Down Gaps: find areas lacking in docs, areas of improvement in code, dependency bumps, and so on.

If time allows, also experiment with Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give agents context on our specific build pipelines and CI/CD logs.

Why?

We know AI can write "Hello World." and also moderately complex programs from a green field. But can it rebase a 3-month-old PR with conflicts in rancher/rancher? I want to find the breaking point of current AI agents to determine if and how they can help us to reduce our technical debt, work faster and better. At the same time, find out about pitfalls and shortcomings.

The Outputs

❥ A "State of the Agentic Union" for SUSE engineers, detailing what works, what explodes, and how much coffee we can drink while the robots do the rebasing.

❥ Honest, Daily Updates With All the Gory Details

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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.

Goals for Hackweek 25

• Update to modern Rancher and verify that existing tests still work
• Change testing logic to populate secrets instead of requiring a secondary script
• Add new tests

Goals for Hackweek 24 (Complete)

• 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/celidon/rancher-troublemaker
• https://github.com/rancher/terraform-provider-rancher2
• https://github.com/rancher/tf-rancher-up
• https://github.com/rancher/quickstart

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OpenPlatform Self-Service Portal by tmuntan1

Description

In SUSE IT, we developed an internal developer platform for our engineers using SUSE technologies such as RKE2, SUSE Virtualization, and Rancher. While it works well for our existing users, the onboarding process could be better.

To improve our customer experience, I would like to build a self-service portal to make it easy for people to accomplish common actions. To get started, I would have the portal create Jira SD tickets for our customers to have better information in our tickets, but eventually I want to add automation to reduce our workload.

Goals

• Build a frontend website (Angular) that helps customers create Jira SD tickets.
• Build a backend (Rust with Axum) for the backend, which would do all the hard work for the frontend.

Resources

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A CLI for Harvester by mohamed.belgaied

Harvester does not officially come with a CLI tool, the user is supposed to interact with Harvester mostly through the UI. Though it is theoretically possible to use kubectl to interact with Harvester, the manipulation of Kubevirt YAML objects is absolutely not user friendly. Inspired by tools like multipass from Canonical to easily and rapidly create one of multiple VMs, I began the development of Harvester CLI. Currently, it works but Harvester CLI needs some love to be up-to-date with Harvester v1.0.2 and needs some bug fixes and improvements as well.

Project Description

Harvester CLI is a command line interface tool written in Go, designed to simplify interfacing with a Harvester cluster as a user. It is especially useful for testing purposes as you can easily and rapidly create VMs in Harvester by providing a simple command such as: harvester vm create my-vm --count 5 to create 5 VMs named my-vm-01 to my-vm-05.

Harvester CLI is functional but needs a number of improvements: up-to-date functionality with Harvester v1.0.2 (some minor issues right now), modifying the default behaviour to create an opensuse VM instead of an ubuntu VM, solve some bugs, etc.

Github Repo for Harvester CLI: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli

Done in previous Hackweeks

• Create a Github actions pipeline to automatically integrate Harvester CLI to Homebrew repositories: DONE
• Automatically package Harvester CLI for OpenSUSE / Redhat RPMs or DEBs: DONE

Goal for this Hackweek

The goal for this Hackweek is to bring Harvester CLI up-to-speed with latest Harvester versions (v1.3.X and v1.4.X), and improve the code quality as well as implement some simple features and bug fixes.

Some nice additions might be: * Improve handling of namespaced objects * Add features, such as network management or Load Balancer creation ? * Add more unit tests and, why not, e2e tests * Improve CI * Improve the overall code quality * Test the program and create issues for it

Issue list is here: https://github.com/belgaied2/harvester-cli/issues

Resources

The project is written in Go, and using client-go the Kubernetes Go Client libraries to communicate with the Harvester API (which is Kubernetes in fact). Welcome contributions are:

• Testing it and creating issues
• Documentation
• Go code improvement

What you might learn

Harvester CLI might be interesting to you if you want to learn more about:

• GitHub Actions
• Harvester as a SUSE Product
• Go programming language
• Kubernetes API
• Kubevirt API objects (Manipulating VMs and VM Configuration in Kubernetes using Kubevirt)

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Mammuthus - The NFS-Ganesha inside Kubernetes controller by vcheng

Description

As the user-space NFS provider, the NFS-Ganesha is wieldy use with serval projects. e.g. Longhorn/Rook. We want to create the Kubernetes Controller to make configuring NFS-Ganesha easy. This controller will let users configure NFS-Ganesha through different backends like VFS/CephFS.

Goals

1. Create NFS-Ganesha Package on OBS: nfs-ganesha5, nfs-ganesha6
2. Create NFS-Ganesha Container Image on OBS: Image
3. Create a Kubernetes controller for NFS-Ganesha and support the VFS configuration on demand. Mammuthus

Resources

NFS-Ganesha

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SUSE Health Check Tools by roseswe

SUSE HC Tools Overview

A collection of tools written in Bash or Go 1.24++ to make life easier with handling of a bunch of tar.xz balls created by supportconfig.

Background: For SUSE HC we receive a bunch of supportconfig tar balls to check them for misconfiguration, areas for improvement or future changes.

Main focus on these HC are High Availability (pacemaker), SLES itself and SAP workloads, esp. around the SUSE best practices.

Goals

• Overall improvement of the tools
• Adding new collectors
• Add support for SLES16

Resources

csv2xls* example.sh go.mod listprodids.txt sumtext* trails.go README.md csv2xls.go exceltest.go go.sum m.sh* sumtext.go vercheck.py* config.ini csvfiles/ getrpm* listprodids* rpmdate.sh* sumxls* verdriver* credtest.go example.py getrpm.go listprodids.go sccfixer.sh* sumxls.go verdriver.go

docollall.sh* extracthtml.go gethostnamectl* go.sum numastat.go cpuvul* extractcluster.go firmwarebug* gethostnamectl.go m.sh* numastattest.go cpuvul.go extracthtml* firmwarebug.go go.mod numastat* xtr_cib.sh*

$ getrpm -r pacemaker >> Product ID: 2795 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP7 x86_64), RPM Name: +--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+ | Package Name | Version | Arch | Release | Repository | +--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+ | pacemaker | 2.1.10+20250718.fdf796ebc8 | x86_64 | 150700.3.3.1 | sle-ha/15.7/x86_64 | | pacemaker | 2.1.9+20250410.471584e6a2 | x86_64 | 150700.1.9 | sle-ha/15.7/x86_64 | +--------------+----------------------------+--------+--------------+--------------------+ Total packages found: 2

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Play with the userfaultfd(2) system call and download on demand using HTTP Range Requests with Golang by rbranco

Description

The userfaultfd(2) is a cool system call to handle page faults in user-space. This should allow me to list the contents of an ISO or similar archive without downloading the whole thing. The userfaultfd(2) part can also be done in theory with the PROT_NONE mprotect + SIGSEGV trick, for complete Unix portability, though reportedly being slower.

Goals

1. Create my own library for userfaultfd(2) in Golang.
2. Create my own library for HTTP Range Requests.
3. Complete portability with Unix.
4. Benchmarks.
5. Contribute some tests to LTP.

Resources

1. https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/userfaultfd.html
2. https://github.com/loopholelabs/userfaultfd-go
3. https://github.com/DHowett/ranger
4. https://www.cons.org/cracauer/cracauer-userfaultfd.html

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Create a go module to wrap happy-compta.fr by cbosdonnat

Description

https://happy-compta.fr is a tool for french work councils simple book keeping. While it does the job, it has no API to work with and it is tedious to enter loads of operations.

Goals

Write a go client module to be used as an API to programmatically manipulate the tool.

Writing an example tool to load data from a CSV file would be good too.

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Rewrite Distrobox in go (POC) by fabriziosestito

Description

Rewriting Distrobox in Go.

Main benefits:

• Easier to maintain and to test
• Adapter pattern for different container backends (LXC, systemd-nspawn, etc.)

Goals

• Build a minimal starting point with core commands
• Keep the CLI interface compatible: existing users shouldn't notice any difference
• Use a clean Go architecture with adapters for different container backends
• Keep dependencies minimal and binary size small
• Benchmark against the original shell script

Resources

• Upstream project: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/
• Distrobox site: https://distrobox.it/
• ArchWiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox

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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

Modernization, maturity, and maintenance.

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DNS management with DNSControl by itorres

Description

We use several systems to manage DNS at SUSE and openSUSE: BIND, external providers, PowerDNS... each of them is managed in a different way either with raw zones (BIND) or Terraform (external providers).

DNSControl is an opinionated tool to manage DNS as code while being provider agnostic. It's developed and used by StackExchange, was spearheaded by Tom Limoncelly and is already being used to manage DNS for openSUSE.

Implementing DNSControl should allow us to have a single DNS operations interface that end users can leverage.

This would reduce complexity for end users as they can use a single simplified ECMAScript based DSL instead of BIND zones for internal and HCL config for external.

Operations for our IT organization would be greatly reduced. DNSControl itself has several internal checks that reduce our need to do linting and we can concentrate on implementing logical checks based on ownership.

This simplifies reviews a lot and the integration with BIND and providers allows our IT organization to implement an apply on merge.

At an organizational level it will separate our DNS tasks from other IT operations, speeding up DNS changes and allowing us to delegate DNS reviews to service desk or even customer teams through CODEOWNERS.

Goals

• Create a test subdomain in one of our internal BIND servers to be managed with DNSControl.
• Create an internal DNSControl repository to implement gitops for DNS.
• Deploy DNS changes strictly through gitops.

Extended goals

• Implement CODEOWNERS.
• Replicate main goals for external DNS.

Resources

• DNSControl documentation and introduction
• Opinions guiding DNSControl
• Package in OBS
• openSUSE repo to manage DNS with DNS Control

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