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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Flaky Tests AI Finder for Uyuni and MLM Test Suites by oscar-barrios

Description

Our current Grafana dashboards provide a great overview of test suite health, including a panel for "Top failed tests." However, identifying which of these failures are due to legitimate bugs versus intermittent "flaky tests" is a manual, time-consuming process. These flaky tests erode trust in our test suites and slow down development.

This project aims to build a simple but powerful Python script that automates flaky test detection. The script will directly query our Prometheus instance for the historical data of each failed test, using the jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age metric. It will then format this data and send it to the Gemini API with a carefully crafted prompt, asking it to identify which tests show a flaky pattern.

The final output will be a clean JSON list of the most probable flaky tests, which can then be used to populate a new "Top Flaky Tests" panel in our existing Grafana test suite dashboard.

Goals

By the end of Hack Week, we aim to have a single, working Python script that:

1. Connects to Prometheus and executes a query to fetch detailed test failure history.
2. Processes the raw data into a format suitable for the Gemini API.
3. Successfully calls the Gemini API with the data and a clear prompt.
4. Parses the AI's response to extract a simple list of flaky tests.
5. Saves the list to a JSON file that can be displayed in Grafana.
6. New panel in our Dashboard listing the Flaky tests

Resources

• Jenkins Prometheus Exporter: https://github.com/uyuni-project/jenkins-exporter/
• Data Source: Our internal Prometheus server.
• Key Metric: jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age{jobname, buildid, suite, case, status, failedsince}.
• Existing Query for Reference: count by (suite) (max_over_time(jenkins_build_test_case_failure_age{status=~"FAILED|REGRESSION", jobname="$jobname"}[$__range])).
• AI Model: The Google Gemini API.
• Example about how to interact with Gemini API: https://github.com/srbarrios/FailTale/
• Visualization: Our internal Grafana Dashboard.
• Internal IaC: https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/tree/master/srv/salt/monitoring

Outcome

• Jenkins Flaky Test Detector: https://github.com/srbarrios/jenkins-flaky-tests-detector and its container
• IaC on MLM Team: https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/tree/master/srv/salt/monitoring/jenkinsflakytestsdetector?reftype=heads, https://gitlab.suse.de/galaxy/infrastructure/-/blob/master/srv/salt/monitoring/grafana/dashboards/flaky-tests.json?ref_type=heads, and others.
• Grafana Dashboard: https://grafana.mgr.suse.de/d/flaky-tests/flaky-tests-detection @ @ text

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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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Set Uyuni to manage edge clusters at scale by RDiasMateus

Description

Prepare a Poc on how to use MLM to manage edge clusters. Those cluster are normally equal across each location, and we have a large number of them.

The goal is to produce a set of sets/best practices/scripts to help users manage this kind of setup.

Goals

step 1: Manual set-up

Goal: Have a running application in k3s and be able to update it using System Update Controler (SUC)

• Deploy Micro 6.2 machine

• Deploy k3s - single node

  • https://docs.k3s.io/quick-start

• Build/find a simple web application (static page)

  • Build/find a helmchart to deploy the application

• Deploy the application on the k3s cluster

• Install App updates through helm update

• Install OS updates using MLM

step 2: Automate day 1

Goal: Trigger the application deployment and update from MLM

• Salt states For application (with static data)
  • Deploy the application helmchart, if not present
  • install app updates through helmchart parameters
• Link it to GIT
  • Define how to link the state to the machines (based in some pillar data? Using configuration channels by importing the state? Naming convention?)
  • Use git update to trigger helmchart app update
• Recurrent state applying configuration channel?

step 3: Multi-node cluster

Goal: Use SUC to update a multi-node cluster.

• Create a multi-node cluster
• Deploy application
  • call the helm update/install only on control plane?
• Install App updates through helm update
• Prepare a SUC for OS update (k3s also? How?)
  • https://github.com/rancher/system-upgrade-controller
  • https://documentation.suse.com/cloudnative/k3s/latest/en/upgrades/automated.html
  • Update/deploy the SUC?
  • Update/deploy the SUC CRD with the update procedure

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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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Background Coding Agent by mmanno

Description

I had only bad experiences with AI one-shots. However, monitoring agent work closely and interfering often did result in productivity gains.

Now, other companies are using agents in pipelines. That makes sense to me, just like CI, we want to offload work to pipelines: Our engineering teams are consistently slowed down by "toil": low-impact, repetitive maintenance tasks. A simple linter rule change, a dependency bump, rebasing patch-sets on top of newer releases or API deprecation requires dozens of manual PRs, draining time from feature development.

So far we have been writing deterministic, script-based automation for these tasks. And it turns out to be a common trap. These scripts are brittle, complex, and become a massive maintenance burden themselves.

Can we make prompts and workflows smart enough to succeed at background coding?

Goals

We will build a platform that allows engineers to execute complex code transformations using prompts.

By automating this toil, we accelerate large-scale migrations and allow teams to focus on high-value work.

Our platform will consist of three main components:

• "Change" Definition: Engineers will define a transformation as a simple, declarative manifest:
  
  • The target repositories.
    
  • A wrapper to run a "coding agent", e.g., "gemini-cli".
    
  • The task as a natural language prompt.
    
• "Change" Management Service: A central service that orchestrates the jobs. It will receive Change definitions and be responsible for the job lifecycle.
  
• Execution Runners: We could use existing sandboxed CI runners (like GitHub/GitLab runners) to execute each job or spawn a container.

MVP

• Define the Change manifest format.
  
• Build the core Management Service that can accept and queue a Change.
• Connect management service and runners, dynamically dispatch jobs to runners.
• Create a basic runner script that can run a hard-coded prompt against a test repo and open a PR.
  

Stretch Goals:

• Multi-layered approach, Workflow Agents trigger Coding Agents:
  
  1. Workflow Agent: Gather information about the task interactively from the user.
     
  2. Coding Agent: Once the interactive agent has refined the task into a clear prompt, it hands this prompt off to the "coding agent." This background agent is responsible for executing the task and producing the actual pull request.
     
• Use MCP:
  
  1. Workflow Agent gathers context information from Slack, Github, etc.
     
  2. Workflow Agent triggers a Coding Agent.
     
• Create a "Standard Task" library with reliable prompts.
  1. Rebasing rancher-monitoring to a new version of kube-prom-stack
     
  2. Update charts to use new images
     
  3. Apply changes to comply with a new linter
     
  4. Bump complex Go dependencies, like k8s modules
     
  5. Backport pull requests to other branches
• Add “review agents” that review the generated PR.
  

See also

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Song Search with CLAP by gcolangiuli

Description

Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) is an open-source library that enables the training of a neural network on both Audio and Text descriptions, making it possible to search for Audio using a Text input. Several pre-trained models for song search are already available on huggingface

Goals

Evaluate how CLAP can be used for song searching and determine which types of queries yield the best results by developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in Python. Based on the results of this MVP, future steps could include:

• Music Tagging;
• Free text search;
• Integration with an LLM (for example, with MCP or the OpenAI API) for music suggestions based on your own library.

The code for this project will be entirely written using AI to better explore and demonstrate AI capabilities.

Result

In this MVP we implemented:

• Async Song Analysis with Clap model
• Free Text Search of the songs
• Similar song search based on vector representation
• Containerised version with web interface

We also documented what went well and what can be improved in the use of AI.

You can have a look at the result here:

• Result Presentation
• hw25-song-search Github repo

Future implementation can be related to performance improvement and stability of the analysis.

References

• CLAP: The main model being researched;
• huggingface: Pre-trained models for CLAP;
• Free Music Archive: Creative Commons songs that can be used for testing;

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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 CONCLUSION!!!

A State of the Union document was compiled to summarize lessons learned this week. For more gory details, just read on the diary below!

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MCP Trace Suite by r1chard-lyu

Description

This project plans to create an MCP Trace Suite, a system that consolidates commonly used Linux debugging tools such as bpftrace, perf, and ftrace.

The suite is implemented as an MCP Server. This architecture allows an AI agent to leverage the server to diagnose Linux issues and perform targeted system debugging by remotely executing and retrieving tracing data from these powerful tools.

• Repo: https://github.com/r1chard-lyu/systracesuite
• Demo: Slides

Goals

1. Build an MCP Server that can integrate various Linux debugging and tracing tools, including bpftrace, perf, ftrace, strace, and others, with support for future expansion of additional tools.

2. Perform testing by intentionally creating bugs or issues that impact system performance, allowing an AI agent to analyze the root cause and identify the underlying problem.

Resources

• Gemini CLI: https://geminicli.com/
• eBPF: https://ebpf.io/
• bpftrace: https://github.com/bpftrace/bpftrace/
• perf: https://perfwiki.github.io/main/
• ftrace: https://github.com/r1chard-lyu/tracium/

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GenAI-Powered Systemic Bug Evaluation and Management Assistant by rtsvetkov

Motivation

What is the decision critical question which one can ask on a bug? How this question affects the decision on a bug and why?

Let's make GenAI look on the bug from the systemic point and evaluate what we don't know. Which piece of information is missing to take a decision?

Description

To build a tool that takes a raw bug report (including error messages and context) and uses a large language model (LLM) to generate a series of structured, Socratic-style or Systemic questions designed to guide a the integration and development toward the root cause, rather than just providing a direct, potentially incorrect fix.

Goals

Set up a Python environment

Set the environment and get a Gemini API key. 2. Collect 5-10 realistic bug reports (from open-source projects, personal projects, or public forums like Stack Overflow—include the error message and the initial context).

Build the Dialogue Loop

1. Write a basic Python script using the Gemini API.
2. Implement a simple conversational loop: User Input (Bug) -> AI Output (Question) -> User Input (Answer to AI's question) -> AI Output (Next Question). Code Implementation

Socratic/Systemic Strategy Implementation

1. Refine the logic to ensure the questions follow a Socratic and Systemic path (e.g., from symptom-> context -> assumptions -> -> critical parts -> ).
2. Implement Function Calling (an advanced feature of the Gemini API) to suggest specific actions to the user, like "Run a ping test" or "Check the database logs."
3. Implement Bugzillla call to collect the
4. Implement Questioning Framework as LLVM pre-conditioning
5. Define set of instructions
6. Assemble the Tool

Resources

What are Systemic Questions?

Systemic questions explore the relationships, patterns, and interactions within a system rather than focusing on isolated elements.
In IT, they help uncover hidden dependencies, feedback loops, assumptions, and side-effects during debugging or architecture analysis.

Gitlab Project

gitlab.suse.de/sle-prjmgr/BugDecisionCritical_Question

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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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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 (including bootstrapping with bootstrap script) and Salt-ssh clients

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 :-)

In progress/done for Hack Week 25

Guide

We started writin a Guide: Adding a new client GNU Linux distribution to Uyuni at https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni/wiki/Guide:-Adding-a-new-client-GNU-Linux-distribution-to-Uyuni, to make things easier for everyone, specially those not too familiar wht Uyuni or not technical.

openSUSE Leap 16.0

The distribution will all love!

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Roadmap#DRAFTScheduleforLeap16.0

Curent Status We started last year, it's complete now for Hack Week 25! :-D

• [W] Reposync (this will require using spacewalk-common-channels and adding channels to the .ini file) NOTE: Done, client tools for SLMicro6 are using as those for SLE16.0/openSUSE Leap 16.0 are not available yet
• [W] 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)
• [W] Package management (install, remove, update...). Works, even reboot requirement detection

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openQA tests needles elaboration using AI image recognition by mdati

Description

In the openQA test framework, to identify the status of a target SUT image, a screenshots of GUI or CLI-terminal images, the needles framework scans the many pictures in its repository, having associated a given set of tags (strings), selecting specific smaller parts of each available image. For the needles management actually we need to keep stored many screenshots, variants of GUI and CLI-terminal images, eachone accompanied by a dedicated set of data references (json).

A smarter framework, using image recognition based on AI or other image elaborations tools, nowadays widely available, could improve the matching process and hopefully reduce time and errors, during the images verification and detection process.

Goals

Main scope of this idea is to match a "graphical" image of the console or GUI status of a running openQA test, an image of a shell console or application-GUI screenshot, using less time and resources and with less errors in data preparation and use, than the actual openQA needles framework; that is:

• having a given SUT (system under test) GUI or CLI-terminal screenshot, with a local distribution of pixels or text commands related to a running test status,
• we want to identify a desired target, e.g. a screen image status or data/commands context,
  • based on AI/ML-pretrained archives containing object or other proper elaboration tools,
  • possibly able to identify also object not present in the archive, i.e. by means of AI/ML mechanisms.
• the matching result should be then adapted to continue working in the openQA test, likewise and in place of the same result that would have been produced by the original openQA needles framework.
• We expect an improvement of the matching-time(less time), reliability of the expected result(less error) and simplification of archive maintenance in adding/removing objects(smaller DB and less actions).

Hackweek POC:

Main steps

• Phase 1 - Plan
  • study the available tools
  • prepare a plan for the process to build
• Phase 2 - Implement
  • write and build a draft application
• Phase 3 - Data
  • prepare the data archive from a subset of needles
  • initialize/pre-train the base archive
  • select a screenshot from the subset, removing/changing some part
• Phase 4 - Test
  • run the POC application
  • expect the image type is identified in a good %.

Resources

First step of this project is quite identification of useful resources for the scope; some possibilities are:

• SUSE AI and other ML tools (i.e. Tensorflow)
• Tools able to manage images
• RPA test tools (like i.e. Robot framework)
  
• other.

Project references

• Repository: openqa-needles-AI-driven

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