Releases
Since 1.19.0 went out right at the end of August, it’s a bit quiet for releases just now. However, 1.18.2 has been released, containing 9 bug fixes for the 1.18 series. Do upgrade if you’re still on 1.18!
Also, as mentioned in the previous newsletter, Katello 3.8.0 was indeed close to release - in fact, it was made available on Sep 6th! With ~50 improvements, and of course compatibility with Foreman 1.19, you’ll want to get that upgrade in as well.
As ever, many thanks to the contributors to these releases - coders, RC testers, documentation writers, and bug/feature reporters. Foreman wouldn’t be what it is without you! If you do find issues with, please do report them!
Critical Security issue in Remote Execution plugin
If you use the Remote Execution plugin, you’ll want to make sure you’ve seen CVE-2018-14643 and the associated updates on the forum. This is an arbitrary code execution flaw on hosts managed by Foreman, so please do take this seriously.
Updates are available for the affected packages from Foreman 1.15+, see the forum post for details.
RFCs for comment
As usual, I like to call out some RFCs for wider attention. Here’s this month’s selection:
- Replacing Foreman-hooks with something built in to core
- Adding a ‘Managed’ flag to the NIC overview
- Using Puma as the default Smart-proxy web server
In addition, I’ll again mention the large set of RFCs regarding our approach to making Foreman able to run in a (set of) container(s) - lots of good discussion is happening here, but more voices are welcome. Start with the overview and then dive into the details RFCs from there.
New Community stats dashboard
One of my long-term to-do items as community lead has been to create a metrics dashboard that we can use to track various things that matter to us as a community. That’s been on the back burner for a while, but I’ve now had time to get started on it. You can find the current version here.
The current version is somewhat alpha, and only covers:
- Total Open / Total Closed / Net Open bug (all projects or for one project)
- Open bugs by project / category / triage status
- Community demographics (age of Redmine account for people who created/commented on a bug in the last 6 months)
Already this helps us to see the state of the community, track it’s evolution, and hopefully focus on certain bug categories. I have more charts and interactive tools in development - if you know the “R” language and would like to help, I’m reachable here :)
Hacktoberfest (via DigitalOcean and GitHub)
If you’re looking for that extra incentive to get you contributing, it seems that DigitalOcean & GitHub are again running a Hacktoberfest Event. You can get the full details over there but essentially, 5 separate (and not spammy) PRs to any GitHub repos will count. So, that means our repos too :). It appears they have 50,000 t-shirts to give away to those who manage 5 PRs during the month of October. Get contributing!
Upcoming Events
All Foreman events are available via the forum calendar - hit the Subscribe button (which will give you an ICS link). You can also use the Add To Calendar button on specific events if you don’t wish to import the whole thing.
Future community demos will now be created much further in advance, so you should be able to keep up with upcoming demos there.
All the usual goodness from the community, rounded up and presented for your viewing pleasure.
On October 16, 2018 the Open Source Automation Day of ATIX AG will take place in the Mercedes-Benz Tower in Munich.
At one of Munich’s largest open source conferences we offer you an appealing program with lectures, live demos, talks and discussions. We focus on a mix of business and technical topics. The focus here is on possibilities for the simple and automatic operation of data centres. A special focus is on the latest technologies.
We at ATIX think, that it’s a good time to hold a Foreman TechDay the day after the OSAD conference in Munich. The Foreman TechDay is targeted at software developers who already have knowledge of software development in Foreman or similar solutions like Ansible module development. Feel free to add suggestions for topics!
I’ll be at OSS-EU on Oct 22-24th - I have two talks there in the community track (which aren’t really about Foreman, but about community work in general), and I’ll spend a lot of my time hanging out at the Red Hat stand. Come find me if you want to chat! :)
Past Events
Hammer, Ansible variables, content changes, and a quick overview of the new stats dashboard. Click the link to see the full agenda!
Plugin news
New Plugins:
Integration of the M2 (Malleable Metal as a Service) with Foreman. Check out the forum post for more details.
Updated plugins:
- foreman_ansible updated to 2.2.9
- foreman_chef updated to 0.8.1
- foreman_openscap updated to 0.10.3
- foreman_remote_execution updated to 1.6.3
- foreman_userdatato 0.1.0
- hammer_cli_foreman_tasks updated to 0.0.13
- hammer_cli_foreman_templates updated to 0.1.2
- hammer_cli_katello updated to 0.14.1
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, meetups and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!