Fedora Infrastructure hackfest 2018

by on 2018/04/15 at 3:33 pm
Posted In: ansible, fedora, linux, rawhide

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 2018 Infrastructure Hackfest in Fredricksberg, VA. It was a very productive week and very nice to meet up face to face with a lot of folks I work with mostly over IRC and email.

Travel went pretty well for me (direct flights, 4-5 hours each way) and the hotel worked out nicely. I liked that the hotel had a big table (with power!) in the corner of the lobby for us to use in evenings for more hacking. Our day workspace was a classroom at a nearby grad college. Aside from some firewall issues monday morning (They were blocking everything but 80/443) it worked pretty well too. Lots of tables we could move around, and whiteboards/projector.

Monday we went over current package maintainer workflows and looked for improvements we could land. Pagure 4.0 (out very soon now) should let us fix the silly ‘get a pagure token for this and put it in a config file’ workflow. We also got bodhi to have a ‘waive’ button to waive test results from the web ui, along with showing what exact tests were missing or failing (so we can get rid of a hacky shell script on the wiki for this purpose). After workflows, we started on package maintainer docs rework. We wanted to move them out of the wiki and clean them up and reorg them. First we tried to identify all wiki pages that are related here and make sure we got all the popular ones, then we brainstormed some personas (new to packaging, upstream maintainer wanting to just package their project, someone who doesn’t have time to follow process and just wants the steps to do an update, someone who wants to know how it all works, etc), then we wrote up a bunch of things these people would want to do and tried to organize new docs for it. It’s not really yet in a state to get wide feedback, but hopefully soon it will be.

Tuesday we talked about reassigning some apps that were maintained by someone who moved to other work, then retired a few apps that have been limping along that we no longer want to spend time on: darkserver (which actually has been broken the last year or so), and summershum (which got checksums of source file uploads), which we never quite figured a use for. Next up was rawhide gating. We went over the proposal send to the devel list and got more detailed about what exact things we would need to do for it. It turns out that just adding some things to the update object we could handle the case of side tags and the work won’t be as big as we thought it would.

Wed was setting up a AWX instance. This is the upstream version of ansible tower. We hoped that using it would give us some good advantages. Unfortunately we hit a number of issues. If we tried to install with a external db the install failed, so we had to move back to a db in container next to the rest, then we got pretty far on configuring authentication and hit a bug preventing SAML from working, then finally we hit an issue where we couldn’t get our private repo mounted in the right container to allow us to have access to our secrets. There will be more discussion on this in the coming weeks and we can decide if the effort is worth it or if we should just keep on going the way we had been. As a side note we looked more at the loopabull setup we have. It has only one demo job in it, but it seems ready to add more into as soon as we would like. Look for us to use that more soon too.

Thursday was more work on rawhide gating and some discussion around openshift. Patrick took the projector and he and Randy got bodhi’s web frontend completely moved over to our openshift (but prod is still not pointing at these new instances until we are ready). We also did some more work on release-monitoring.org (anitya) and got it much further along. There were a number of tweaks and improvements to our openshift playbooks too.

Friday we just met at the hotel as everyone was traveling away, so we just worked on finishing some things up.

A few things that got done also over multiple days or between other issues:

  • jenkins.fedorainfracloud.org is now redirecting to centos-ci. This is the jenkins used by various pagure projects to test their code. We had been working on moving it, but hadn’t gotten to it. Now it’s all done except for a more perm redirect.
  • Various internal hardware/budgeting/ordering things were sorted out
  • Tracked down and fixed our old cloud when updates caused it to stop processing copr builders right.
  • Initial work was started on CAIAPI and the small flask based web frontend in front of it (This will replace fas2).
  • Priorities were added to the infrastructure issue tracker to help set expectations on what issues are waiting on what.
  • A new template was added to the infrastructure issue tracker to help us know what issues need to be done by and what they impact.
  • Some thoughts for making the weekly meetings more interesting or more accessable to the developers on the team were brainstormed.
  • We got RHEL 7.5 and openshift 3.9 all set to upgrade to after the upcoming freeze is over.

All in all, a very pproductive week of hacking on things. Many thanks to Paul Frields (stickster) for organizing everything and the Council/OSAS/Fedora Engineering for sponsoring things.

 

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Rawhide notes from the trail: more rocky trail

by on 2018/04/07 at 4:19 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

It’s continued to be a bit of a rocky trail of late for rawhide.

The last 6 composes have failed due to:

  • 2018-04-03: New xorg-x11-server landed (1.20). However, tigervnc and xorg-x11-drv-vesa were not rebuilt for it yet, the broken deps caused the failure.
  • 2018-04-04: Same as 03, but the right folks fixed things this day.
  • 2018-04-05: pykickstart dropped python2-kickstart subpackage, which is needed by python2-img which is needed by appliance-creator. Untagged pykickstart for now.
  • 2018-04-06: The kde live media ran out of space.
  • 2018-04-07: The kde live media ran out of space. Bumped up the space slightly to allow it to (hopefully) complete.

I am looking forward to next week when we hope to get things setup for some gating in rawhide. I know it couldn’t handle all these issues, but it’s a start and we can add things as we know how to detect them in advance.

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Rawhide notes from the trail, a Milestone. No? Yes!

by on 2018/03/26 at 5:22 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

As many of you know, we had a long string of difficulties with getting rawhide to compose at all recently. This was mostly a combination of poor timing for things landing, people landing things at the last minute for Fedora 28, and various bugs.

Last week, we hit something that seemed to be pretty special: An actual finished compose. To explain, pungi (the tool that does the composing in Fedora land) has several states that a compose can be in: It can be “STARTED” which means that it started and is composing, or died in such a way it couldn’t properly note that to the compose. It can be “DOOMED” which means that one (or more) required deliverable items failed to compose. In the past this might still have meant part of the compose was shipped out anyhow, but not these days. That prevents the compose from going out at all, and releng folks have to look and make sure the issue that caused the problem is fixed. A compose can be “FINISHED_INCOMPLETE”: This means all the required deliverables are there, but optional/non blocking ones may or may not be. This is the status most of our composes have gotten in the past. Finally, a compose can be ‘FINISHED’ which means all parts of it successfully composed. We had our first “FINISHED” rawhide compose last week. So, break out the harmonica and start dancing right? well, not so fast. There was a bug in pungi where it would have some failed optional deliverables, but still report FINISHED. So, the FINISHED we had wasn’t really a true FINISHED (some ppc images were still failing). Finally late last week we got in a workaround for those last few images, and I am happy to report today that the FINISHED we got was a true, full, real, everything composed FINISHED.

I think some of the credit for this goes to the simple compose tracker that Dusty Mabe setup. This allowed us to track down and fix things that in the past we would just have written off that we don’t have time to fix. Thanks for the issue tracking Dusty! There was of course lots of hard work from many others as well to get to this point: Thanks Mohan, Patrick, Adam, Dennis, Sinny and others I am sure I am forgetting.

Congrats on a FINISHED compose, and lets see how long we can keep it that way.

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Rawhide notes from the trail, the cold hard winter trail…

by on 2018/02/20 at 11:23 am
Posted In: fedora, linux, rawhide

Greetings everyone! Lots of news from the rawhide trail this time:

Astute observers will note that from 2018-02-04 until 2018-02-17 there were no (success-full) rawhide composes. This was due to a long line of issues, problems, new packages, changes and just bad luck, including, but not limited to:

  • New pypkickstart that broke livemedia-composer
  • New pykickstart that broke appliance-creator
  • New libevent that bumped SO, requiring everything using it to be rebuilt but…
  • GCC8 issues with chromium (and also qt5-qtwebengine) that prevented them from being rebuit for the libevent bump.
  • Ongoing issue with armv7 composers getting stuck in mkfs.ext4 on composes, requiring manual intervention to continue the compose.
  • General broken deps after the mass rebuild that broke some (release blocking) live composes.
  • system-config-printer pulling in a PackageKit subpackge, which broke the Xfce live due to it excluding PackageKit*
  • rng-tools, which was broken in the past and untagged, but the mass rebuild rebuilt it again due to the maintainer not cleaning it up yet.
  • Probably other things I am forgetting.

In order to help out all the folks working on fixing things we are trying out a ticket system to track failed composes. See the proof of concept version at: https://pagure.io/dusty/failed-composes/issues I think this already is helping coordinate and communicate breakage. Hopefully we will get it polished up and made “official” soon.

Of course some of the above compose issues were due to the mass rebuild, which happened a few weeks ago. Things seemed to take longer than in the past, I think due to src.fedoraproject.org not committing as quickly as it had in the past. Hopefully we can fix that.

Also, today we are at another milestone: Fedora 28 is branching off rawhide. Rawhide will continue on it’s trail to Fedora 29. Do make sure you know what path you want to follow and that your machine(s) are taking that path. If you do nothing you should end up on Fedora 28 branched and follow it to release.

Gnome was briefly broken in rawhide, but quickly fixed by a new gnome-session build. Thanks gnome maintainers for quickly fixing things up!

The kernel has moved on to 4.16 pre releases in rawhide. Early (before rc1) releases here had no networking with the ath10k card I have in my laptop (it would just never see any wireless networks). After rc1 however things are mostly back to normal. The ath10k is a bit flaky, but mostly works.

Finally, on a personal note, one of my dogs has had major surgery and a long slow road to recovery. I’ve started a gofundme to help defray his massive medical bills. If you would like to donate, pass along or just look at some cute pictures of him, you can go here:  https://www.gofundme.com/medical-bills-for-nash

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Fedora Engineering meetings and devconf.cz

by on 2018/01/31 at 10:25 am
Posted In: fedora, linux, travel

Last week (and part of this), I traveled out to lovely Brno, CZ for some Fedora Engineering meetings and then devconf.cz. Overall it was a great trip!

On the way out (last sunday) I drove up to the portland arirport (about an hour), then plane from PDX to AMS (amsterdam) (about 10 hours), where I met up with Patrick and we both were on a flight from there to PRG (prague)(about 2hours). Then it was a train from Prague to Brno (about 2.5hours) and a deep sleep at the hotel.

Since many of the folks in Fedora Engineering were going to be coming out to devconf.cz, we decided to do some meeting up and discussing things to work on this coming year and to plan out a hackfest we are hoping to do in a few months. Look for more details on all of that, but in a nutshell:

  • We planned out things we could work on a a hackfest: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Hackathon_2018 which looks to be in early april.
  • We talked over ownership of some apps that are needing love and/or having team members move to other things.
  • We talked about plans for account system and where we would like to be.
  • We talked about gating packages in rawhide. We came up with somewhat of a plan, but needs some work/discussion for sure, look for more details soon.
  • We talked about some apps we want to just drop or move to another service, etc.

Look for more news on all of those before we do anything about any of them.

Next was devconf.cz. I was told how big and busy it was, but seeing it all was different. I went to a number of talks, some were pretty good, others just things I already knew. The short talks (23min) were kind of difficult, because it’s really hard to give someone much information in just 23min. You do a intro, discuss something and then it’s over. I was going to give a talk about using Fedora Modular server 27 in production, but since that didn’t ever happen to be released I gave my talk slot over to Stephen Gallagher to talk about the new modularity approach. The hallway track was very nice at devconf.cz… lots of Fedora contributors around to meet again and talk with. Had a bunch of production discssions with too many people to count. It will be interesting to see how the devconf.us works out, it it’s as busy and vibrant.

Then all too soon it was time to pack back up and head home. I managed to get in tuesday afternoon, but promptly crashed for 14 hours. All in all a great trip!

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