Foreman community newsletter - Octobeer 2014

Hello all,

we have published newsletter for October 2014. Turn on your Kindles!

Important security updates
Foreman 1.6.1, 1.6.2 and 1.5.4 have been released to fix an important
security issues affecting the core and the smart proxy (foreman-proxy)
identified as CVE-2014-3590, CVE-2014-3653 and CVE-2014-3691. For more
security-related information visit our Security Page.

Katello 2.0 released
The Katello team announced the official release of Katello 2.0 on
October 6. This release had been a long time coming and brings with it
many new features including a change to Katello architecture and
deployment as a Foreman plugin. Katello was designed to bring
distributed content management alongside the configuration and
provisioning management that Foreman provides. More information can be
found in the Release Notes.

Foreman Live CD
People responsible for the foreman-staypuft plugin which aims for
OpenStack installations using Foreman developed nice Live CD/appliance
which allows users to run Foreman from memory (what we call “stateless”
mode). We have taken this work and published it in foreman-live git
repository, integrated build process in our Jenkins and started with
nightly builds of the live cd. It is currently in alpha stage and expect
rough edges, but In the upcoming months we will work on improving the
Live CD.

New Foreman discovery image
We redesigned how we build foreman discovery image and we are going to
release new version 2.0 which will be smaller, faster, more debugging
options and with the same features as 0.6 release. It will work with
Foreman 1.6 and 1.7. To check the image out, see our pre1 build which
was announced this month.

FOSDEM 2015 is approaching
The FOSDEM and ConfigManagementCamp 2015 Call for Proposals is open
until December 1 and we welcome all proposals related to Foreman. As
usual, FOSDEM will take place at ULB Campus Solbosch on Saturday 31
January and Sunday 1 February 2015 followed by ConfigManagementCamp on
Moday 2 and Tuesday 3 at Gent, Belgium.

Dropping Ruby 1.8.7 support for core
Foreman supports Ruby 1.8.7 from the day one, but since we expect Ruby
2.2 during Christmas and we plan to upgrade to Rails 4.0, it’s the time
to drop support of Ruby 1.8.7 for Foreman core (not Smart Proxy, hammer
or the Installer). We started with turning off unit and integration
tests against Ruby 1.8.7 and removing various related workarounds across
our code base. Also we have started to run our tests against Ruby 2.1.

New plugins this month

  • foreman-cloudstack adds CloudStack compute resource
  • foreman-abrt integrates Automated Bug Reporting Tool from Fedora and Red
    Hat compatible hosts
  • foreman-custom-banner adds user-defined colored top banner
  • foreman-graphite sends performance metrics to Graphite.
  • foreman-hammer-ssh hammer SSH plugin, execute SSH commands across
    multiple foreman managed hosts.

Featured media

  • Sprint 29 demo
  • Sprint 30 demo
  • ABRT plugin deep dive

What to expect in November
Next month, Foreman core team will be working on various features like
mentioned Live CD, better Docker integration, adding http(s) proxy
support to foreman-proxy, UEFI support, improving discovery,
foreman-tasks plugin availability, katello and bastion split and bug
fixing.

Of course, we will be delivering the most anticipated artifact Foreman
1.7.0 beginning December. Expect bunch of Release Candidates during
November. More info in our schedule wiki page.

··· -- Later, Lukas #lzap Zapletal

Exciting stuff happening in foreman/katello world!

Is there any areas you guys need some assistance from the community in to
help realize some of these goals?

Especially happy to see lots of love for Ruby 2.1 and 2.2, i've seen some
great improvements in 2.x and happy to see tests there now!

Hello!

> Is there any areas you guys need some assistance from the community in to
> help realize some of these goals?

Sure, you can easily start with: Foreman :: Contribute

Coding is not the only way of helping. I'd highlight:

> Especially happy to see lots of love for Ruby 2.1 and 2.2, i've seen some
> great improvements in 2.x and happy to see tests there now!

Nightly and RC testing would be most appreciated after we start
upgrading to Rails 4 and Ruby 2.1.

If you into security, we are finishing SELinux policy for foreman-proxy
this sprint. We are going to merge it disabled for nightly, so testers
are needed. It will be a simple command to turn it on and off.

··· -- Later, Lukas #lzap Zapletal