In this blog post, I am going to share my experience on how I made my first contribution to ManageIQ, the upstream open source project for Red Hat CloudForms. The post explains how I encountered and investigated an issue, and finally fixed it thereby sending my first “Pull Request” to ManageIQ repository.

Issue

Red Hat CloudForms ships as an appliance to simplify deployment as much as possible – a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server with the appropriate software loaded, ready to be configured with a few basic configuration options. Traditionally, these servers are configured using the command line tool appliance_console. This is a simple, menu-based interface that allows you to configure the core functionality of the appliance and makes it exceptionally easy to do so. Unfortunately, menu-based interfaces don’t lend themselves to being automated easily. However, there is a solution!

All CloudForms appliances ship with another tool called appliance_console_cli. We can combine this tool with an Ansible playbook to automate the configuration of our appliance(s).

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re delighted to announce the release of ManageIQ Gaprindashvili! This is the seventh ManageIQ release and it’s named after Georgian chess player Nona Gaprindashvili, who became the first woman to be awarded the Grandmaster title in 1978.

The goal of this blog post is to provide a basic understanding of:

1. ManageIQ authentication configurations
2. How to troubleshoot the technologies supporting ManageIQ authentication.
3. What to provide to engineering when an irresolvable ManageIQ authentication issue is encountered.