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.

This blog post provides a high level overview of the ways ManageIQ Authentication can be configured. It also gives a brief summary of the steps used to configure them.

First Mast Lonth

Introduction

This video demonstrates how you can take manual tasks and processes and turn them into automation workflows. In this video we utilize Red Hat CloudForms and Ansible Tower to provide an underlying automation and orchestration framework to deliver automation to your IT organization.

tl;dr we found a memory leak in Ruby… and it mostly wasn’t our fault!

In this article, we describe how High Availability (HA) works natively in Red Hat CloudForms. The mechanism uses PostgreSQL feature, and does not require external tools like Virtual IP (VIP), HAProxy, or Load Balancer. We will use a two-node active/passive architecture as an example to investigate what is happening when failover occurs.

Oh no. Surely they wouldn't have been so foolish as to let d-m-u write yet another one. When will this madness end? They are tempting the very threads of fate herself, letting d-m-u get away with this twice in a row. Who knows what horrors will befall you this time. You shudder. If you are lucky, it will be only physical monsters, not the unearthly disturbances of time and dark and cold that have been evoked with such disasterous results previously. You had held out a smattering of hope that d-m-u's prose might be gentled the way that centuries of water smooth a pebble, but such hope is whisked away with the next thought: you never know, with these texts, if you will exist outside the inky blackness, cursed to only watch as the story dismally unfolds before your eyes, or if you will be a deeply unwilling participant, your agency slave to the whims of an unreliable, mercurial narrator.

Quad Icons: Help Us Improve!

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-2. This release contains security fixes, bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization.

Ever wondered what CloudForms can do for you in AWS? The next few blog posts will walk you through step by step how to upload the CloudForms image to AWS, how to assign the correct policies and roles and how to configure it correctly so it can discover your environment. Part 1 is dedicated to the import and configuration of the CloudForms image.

This part of the CloudForms in AWS blog series will walk you through how to make sure that CloudForms reaches its full potential in AWS.

In this post of our series, we will demonstrate what we did in the previous sections in which we configured AWS and CloudForms, to run a SmartStaty analysis to automatically resolve a vulnerability in Java

Since its founding in 2018, Last Month In MIQ has been the absolute golden standard for journalistic integrity, never afraid to grab truth by the scruff of the neck and shake it up a little. Of course, that being said, we do ever so occasionally take a break from our regularly scheduled program to bring you insights into the minds of our crack team here at MIQ. I know you look forward to such rare occasions with baited breath. Best not to think about what it’s baited with.

Unfortunately the current run of our blog has had to be mostly abandoned because of its low visibility and a striking case of writers’ remorse, but we felt that our readers would still want to know a little something of the private lives of our contributors.

While those on IT side of a CSP (Communications Service Provider) business are quite familiar with cloud management platforms such as ManageIQ, the network side folks are very familiar with Network Function Virtualization Orchestrators (NFV-O) as defined in ETSI MANO spec. These two worlds are converging though and so are their technologies. We came across the presentation on how ManageIQ can now run as an NFV-O to manage your Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). But what if you are already running a ETSI NFV-O in your environment ? Is there still a place for ManageIQ? Definitely.

If you want to use IAM authentication for CloudForms so that IAM users can authenticate with CFME you need to do the following.

For the last few posts Laurent Domb has been explaining how to squeeze CloudForms and AWS integration by teaching you how to:

One of the exciting new features in CloudForms 4.6 within Automate is Embedded Methods. That is, one can store reusable, directly callable, ruby code within Automate and access from other Automate Methods.

This year, we will be showing features, you’ve dreamed of for quite a while. We are, therefore releasing this Red Hat Summit Sneak Peak video to give you some appetite.

This part will focus on how to create the Custom Button using an Ansible playbook.

You wake up. You’re in your house. There’s a gigantic white dog slumbering peacefully with one eye open and a timer that appears to be counting down 120 seconds. You jump up, grab the timer, and run out. You stumble out into a huge monochrome map. North? West? One way is blocked. A minute left. There’s a lighthouse right next to you. You climb as the timer counts down. As the seconds slip away, you find an important quest item at the top of the lighthouse. Congrats! You are holding a tool to process logs looking for frequency of method calls! Ding! The time is up.

You wake up in your little house. There’s the dog… and oh yeah, you suddenly recall that you got an item yesterday. You look around for it. The dog is drooling all over it in its slumber. You sigh but are afraid to wake the beast. You grab the timer and run outside again. The lighthouse is gone, and the only way open to you today is south. You head south as the timer counts down, pausing to examine a stray catalog item with a tag control element. You see that the item is broken, that you cannot order it as you should be able to. You drop it in frustration. Ding!

You wake up. The dog is nowhere to be seen. Incidentally, your tool to process logs isn’t either, and you wonder ruefully if you should have saved it from its fate. The timer is counting down. You grab it and run, heading south again until you reach your catalog item with a tag control element from yesterday. And lo and behold, it appears to be fully functional today! Marvelling, you barely notice that you’re again out of time.

You wake up. The dog is back. Your process logs tool is beaten up but still mostly intact. You grab it and the timer. The dog stirs but does not wake. You hide the tool in your chest, delighting at the fact that it also contains a new Openstack Cinder EventCatcher worker and head out again with the timer. This time there appears to be a small river next to your house. You head towards the sound of the water. On the beach are several RHV markers. Delighted, you grab them. Ding!

You wake up to a very strange sight. The dog has seemingly grown very long claws and is reading on the floor. You stumble to your feet and back up a few steps hurridly. The beast looks at the ticking timer and barks once, a strange bark infused with the burning smell of charter magic. The timer stops. The dog languidly looks up at you, its paws growing back to their regular size, and noses the book towards you. You stare blankly at the upsidedown page, struggling to decipher the seven words which have appeared in front of your eyes. “Fixes disk size misreporting for some disks”, you read. The dog barks again, and the time is, once again, up.

You wake up. You realize with some dread that a sense of realism, concise documentation, perfecting the art of recognizing and handling abnormal people, moving to the eighth dimension, secret messages from your teeth, knowing every line of Airplane!, the music that is sometimes known as blues, a misguided but adorable belief in meaning, or even the sudden development of some semblance of a personality cannot save you.

You cannot be saved.

Here is the video of the live demo Maxim Burgerhout and myself performed at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco 2018.

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-3. This release contains bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization. Here are just a few of the things added since Gaprindashvili-2 release:

It’s an oppressively clammy summer Saturday afternoon. You have the weekend to write YALMiMIQ. It’s Saturday and you can afford to procrastinate. You open the GitHub query and peruse the recent additions anyway, wondering what to showcase this time.

This week is a sing-along MIQ Sea Shanty after the style of the old “Roll the Old Chariot Down”

Introduction

Vote for the I-Release!!! Here is the Poll on talk.manageiq.org

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-4. This release contains bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization. Here are just a few of the things added since Gaprindashvili-3 release:

This is a follow up on our series Infrastructure Tour Italy. In this part we will show Ansible Tower, Drift Analysis and OpenShift Integration

The results of the poll on the name of the I release are in. Vassily Mykhaylovych Ivanchuk is the winner! Looking forward to all the striking features that will come in the Ivanchuk release. Thanks to all that voted - we had 92 total votes for the I-Release.

CloudForms 4.6 provided the ability to run embedded Ansible playbooks as methods, and it can be useful to include such a playbook in an existing workflow such as the VM Provision state machine.

Whether you operate a single standalone CloudForms appliance or multiple multizone regions geographically dispersed with a global master region, effective management makes all the difference.

Reckonings

Overview

Based on the previous article, I´ve created this video to illustrate what we covered

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-5. This release contains security and bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization. Here are just a few of the things added since Gaprindashvili-4 release:

“My name is Ilnarin,” the proud dwarf announced, “daughter of Raszaka, daughter of Ellina, daughter of Almyara, heir to the kingdom of Vik-Huzth, Queen of the Neither-Under-Nor-Over-Folk, ring-carrier, dragon-slayer, M.D., Rt Hon.”

Introduction

We cannot be more excited!!! Peter just finished work on an addendum to the ‘Mastering Automation’ book, to bring it up to date with some of the great new automate features in CloudForms 4.5 & 4.6.

Building A Blog Post

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re pleased to announce the Beta release for ManageIQ Hammer! You can download the Hammer Beta Release here

To queue, or not to queue, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of memcached in containers,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of zone spec failures,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there’s the rub.

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re pleased to announce the Beta2 release for ManageIQ Hammer! You can download the Hammer Beta2 Release here

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-6. This release contains security and bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization. Here are just a few of the things added since Gaprindashvili-5 release:

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re pleased to announce 1st Release Candidate for ManageIQ Hammer! You can download the Hammer RC1 here

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re pleased to announce the 2nd Release Candidate for ManageIQ Hammer! You can download the Hammer RC2 here

Hello everyone, my name is David and I would like to tell you a story that started two years ago. Back in 2016 when ManageIQ was running on Rails 4.2 and the Rails 5 was in beta was when I started looking into ActionCable and WebSockets in general. I had this vision of having asynchronous notifications being emitted from long-running backend jobs that we could display on the frontend as notifications. In the meantime I had some bugs assigned to me about browser-based remote consoles. As you can guess, these consoles were also powered by WebSockets and I had a feeling that I could do some improvements in the area.

We’ve just built Gaprindashvili-7. This release contains security and bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization. Here are just a few of the things added since Gaprindashvili-6 release: