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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Is SUSE Trending? Popularity and Developer Sentiment Insight Using Native AI Capabilities by terezacerna

Description

This project aims to explore the popularity and developer sentiment around SUSE and its technologies compared to Red Hat and their technologies. Using publicly available data sources, I will analyze search trends, developer preferences, repository activity, and media presence. The final outcome will be an interactive Power BI dashboard that provides insights into how SUSE is perceived and discussed across the web and among developers.

Goals

1. Assess the popularity of SUSE products and brand compared to Red Hat using Google Trends.
2. Analyze developer satisfaction and usage trends from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
3. Use the GitHub API to compare SUSE and Red Hat repositories in terms of stars, forks, contributors, and issue activity.
4. Perform sentiment analysis on GitHub issue comments to measure community tone and engagement using built-in Copilot capabilities.
5. Perform sentiment analysis on Reddit comments related to SUSE technologies using built-in Copilot capabilities.
6. Use Gnews.io to track and compare the volume of news articles mentioning SUSE and Red Hat technologies.
7. Test the integration of Copilot (AI) within Power BI for enhanced data analysis and visualization.
8. Deliver a comprehensive Power BI report summarizing findings and insights.
9. Test the full potential of Power BI, including its AI features and native language Q&A.

Resources

1. Google Trends: Web scraping for search popularity data
2. Stack Overflow Developer Survey: For technology popularity and satisfaction comparison
3. GitHub API: For repository data (stars, forks, contributors, issues, comments).
4. Gnews.io API: For article volume and mentions analysis.
5. Reddit: SUSE related topics with comments.

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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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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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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

Debian 13

The new version of the beloved Debian GNU/Linux OS

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

• [ ] 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)
• [ ] Package management (install, remove, update...)
• [ ] Patching (if patch information is available, could require writing some code to parse it, but IIRC we have support for Ubuntu already). Probably not for Debian as IIRC we don't support patches yet.
• [ ] Applying any basic salt state (including a formula)
• [ ] Salt remote commands
• [ ] Bonus point: Java part for product identification, and monitoring enablement
• [ ] Bonus point: sumaform enablement (https://github.com/uyuni-project/sumaform)
• [ ] Bonus point: Documentation (https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-docs)

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Multimachine on-prem test with opentofu, ansible and Robot Framework by apappas

Description

A long time ago I explored using the Robot Framework for testing. A big deficiency over our openQA setup is that bringing up and configuring the connection to a test machine is out of scope.

Nowadays we have a way¹ to deploy SUTs outside openqa, but we only use if for cloud tests in conjuction with openqa. Using knowledge gained from that project I am going to try to create a test scenario that replicates an openqa test but this time including the deployment and setup of the SUT.

Goals

Create a simple multimachine test scenario with the support server and SUT all created by the robot framework.

Resources

1. https://github.com/SUSE/qe-sap-deployment
2. terraform-libvirt-provider

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