Welcome to the March 2014 community newsletter. Feedback always appreciated, if there’s a topic you’d like to see more (or less!) of in these editions.
Call for testing: Foreman 1.5 authorization system
Our Foreman 1.5 development cycle is coming to a close in a couple of weeks, so the aim until the end of April is to finish off the last major features and harden it for release.
To that end, we’re putting out a call for testing, focused on the major improvements to the user authorization system in Foreman 1.5. In particular, we’re interested in environments that rely on user filters, user groups and want fine-grained access controls.
More information about what’s changed, how to test it over the next two or three weeks and report bugs is available on our call for testing page:
Foreman 1.4.2 released
Last week, we released an update to Foreman 1.4 to fix two security issues and a number of bugs. This includes updates to support Puppet 3.5 and Facter 2.0, both of which are being released by Puppet Labs imminently.
Foreman snapshot plugin
Greg Sutcliffe has announced the first (alpha) release of a new plugin called foreman_snapshot, designed to make images or snapshots on compute resources from host groups. The idea is to use host groups as a form of template, creating an image with most of the configuration already applied, and then boot new hosts quickly from this predefined image.
So far it’s implemented for libvirt and OpenStack compute resources, with more to come. Note that it is currently API-only and requires Foreman 1.5/nightly.
- foreman_snapshot project
- Deep dive: building images from host groups
- Sprint demo 17
- Sprint demo 21: added libvirt support
Further watching: Sprint 21
Sprint 21 included the new authorization system and other large features such as CLI enhancements that will make up the Foreman 1.5 release. The demo of the work from this sprint is now available and includes foreman_snapshot’s libvirt support, Hammer CLI enhancements, LDAP group support, a live CD of Foreman and more work on the configuration groups UI. Watch the video here:
- Foreman Sprint Demo 21 (see description for full agenda)
OpenStack Foreman Installer
RDO has offered Foreman as an installation method for OpenStack for the last couple of releases, but a team of developers are working on a major update for the installation and setup process of Foreman itself (called “OFI” for “OpenStack Foreman Installer” or “Staypuft”).
This is based on a new plugin to Foreman and coupled with the Discovery plugin to quickly provision physical hosts. See these two videos for two aspects of the combined installer, and follow the foreman-dev mailing list for updates:
- Staypuft OpenStack Foreman Installer Plugin (UI)
- Staypuft OpenStack Foreman installer DynFlow Orchestration
As a further part of this work, a new live CD is being developed that contains Foreman pre-installed with Discovery ready for provisioning. Follow the foreman-live project here and watch the demo here.
GNOME OPW and events
The Foreman project is proud to be part of this summer’s GNOME Outreach Program For Women, helping women get involved in open source projects.
While the Foreman application period is just wrapping up (by 31st March), we’ve seen a number of new faces get involved in the project over the past couple of weeks and are very happy to have received patches to some of our projects.
Next month, there’s a talk on Foreman and Chef integration at #ChefConf 2014 (San Francisco), on Thursday 17th April. Tickets for the conference are still available!