Report from CentOS Connect, Fosdem and Cfgmgmt Camp 2024

[Marek_Hulan]

@lstejska

P.I.G. (or F.P.G.)
Foreman devs came up with the idea of having a Provisioning Interest Group, or Foreman Provisioning Group, depending on which name you prefer, focused on meeting with people who are directly involved in the development of features related to the provisioning and computing resources.

How do I sign up? FTR I vote for P.I.G.

@lstejska

VMware exodus
Quite a few people mentioned leaving VMware due to the changes in their licensing after they had been bought by Broadcom company. Simply it’s more expensive than it was before and users are looking for cheaper alternatives.

Did you get also where they migrate to? Is that still private virtualization or public cloud? Are they abandoning the virtualization completely and switching to containers?

@lstejska

The second user said that they might be interested in it, but my feeling was that they would do it only if it would gain something for them.

Did they or you come up with some idea, what that something may be?

@lstejska

provisioning and management of network devices (routers, switches)

We do have some provisioning templates for this and ansible integration, that could use the popular ansible roles Use Ansible network roles — Ansible Community Documentation

I wonder, do we have anyone here who played with this or even use this from Foreman? If not, should we clean up the existing provisioning templates?

@lstejska

A lot of people were not aware of foreman_bootdisk or foreman_discovery features. Like at all. We should do something with it.

What about this? Highlighting Popular Use Cases in Foreman Community Demos

@lstejska

One interesting idea was to have a system where we could allow users to vote on issues and requested features, something like UserVoice, but open source of course. It could be another valuable input, with a simple and clear message of what the community wants.

We have voting plugin in redmine, but almost no one is using it. Probably because people report issues on discourse.

@lstejska

For VMware, guys from Sweden University have a plugin that enables secure boot for VMware, so we’ll take inspiration there for sure.

I guess our liu.se friends, such as @ananace and @magnus. Does that mean that they can create VMware VM with UEFI? Does it set the bootorder? Or something else? Is there a public repo?

@aruzicka

IIRC I’ve had two people ask about provisioning raspberry pis with foreman.

@nofaralfasi

More deep-dives, example use-cases, documentation, etc.

Yeah, we need to start doing the use case deepdives

@nofaralfasi

In the host creation form, remove irrelevant configuration options (for example, in the PXE loader selection).

Any more examples that you could remember? I’m starting to have a feeling we need the existing complex form as well as some very simplified version that users can tailor to their needs.

@nofaralfasi

Add a console to display the output of the provisioning on the client host (nice to have, not a must).

I think we have that, it’s just hard to configure. The only good thread I found about debugging this was Foreman ui noVNC console broke - #11 by lzap

Thanks everyone for detailed trip reports, that’s really useful reading!