Foreman Birthday Party 2024
On July 15th, ATIX had the honor of hosting the 15th Foreman Birthday in Garching close to our main office. We had a blast meeting all the faces of the community that we’ve only interacted with over the wire all year. After a short greeting by Bernhard, the community contributed talks started.
“Automated Provisioning with Secure Boot and Foreman”
The first presentation was given by Jan Löser and Markus Reisner (both ATIX) on the topic „Automated Provisioning with Secure Boot and Foreman“ They spoke about their vision to add Secure Boot support for arbitrary client operating systems by making Foreman / Smart Proxies provide client OS-specific boot files.This is necessary for provisioning Secure Boot enabled hosts, as Secure Boot relies on a chain of trust from the very first loaded shim to the booted kernel. The main benefit for everybody is that operating systems of Secure Boot enabled hosts no longer must match the operating system of the Smart Proxy itself. On their journey from the initial PoC to the upstream PRs that are ready-to-be-merged soonish, a lot of discussions and fine tuning happened in the community.
„How Foreman Community enables new contributors“
The second talk was from Martin Alfke (betadots) on „How Foreman Community enables new contributors“ Martin spoke about the process of developing a new Foreman plugin for Hiera Data Manager (HDM).The Foreman HDM plugin uses Foreman Web UI to present Puppet variables. The advantage is the automatic resolution of the hierarchical data structures through nested Puppet classes. Due to the openness of the Foreman Community and the Template for Foreman / Smart Proxy Plugins, they were able to get their new plugin up and running quickly..
„Foreman build test environment: migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions“
Next was Evgeni Golov (Red Hat) whose topic was „Foreman build test environment: migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions“ He told the tale of the migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Evgeni took charge in consolidating and converting scripts used for into linting, testing and releasing Ruby Gems GitHub Actions.These can easily be reused, even in different name spaces. One incentive to move Foreman plugins to the “theforeman” namespace is free GitHub CI minutes.
„Foreman – a complete lifecycle management tool for desktops“
In his presentation „Foreman – a complete lifecycle management tool for desktops“ Dirk Götz focuses (Netwaysfocused on provisioning and managing desktop computers to create identical and reproducible setups of notebooks by non-technical users. One of the challenges is configuring graphical applications that are traditionally not meant to be administered in a non-interactive way. In the end, with the right configuration, Foreman is very capable of managing notebooks and desktop computers.
„Foreman documentation: Helping users figure out since May 15, 2019“
Maximilian Kolb (ATIX) and Aneta Šteflová (Red Hat) shared in their talk „Foreman documentation: Helping users figure out since May 15, 2019“ an annual update about Foreman documentation..
Zu den neuen Inhalten gehören Best Practices und eine Überarbeitung de Some of the new content includes best practices and a rework of the provisioning guide..
In ihrem Ausblick teilten sie das Ziel mit, einen neuen Leitfaden für Standardbetriebsumgebungen hinzuzufügen, um Benutzern den Einstieg in die Verwendung von Foreman in Unternehmensumgebungen zu erleichtern.
Sie sprachen auch über ihr Bemühen, die In their outlook, they shared the goal of adding a new standard operating environment guide to help users getting started using Foreman in enterprise environments. They also spoke about their effort to make the contributing experience as smooth as possible. Everyone is warmly welcome to contribute to the Foreman documentation in form of PRs and technical reviews.
„New Feature: Pushing Containers Into Katello“.
Last but not least, Ian Ballou (Red Hat) joined us online from the USA with the talk on „New Feature: Pushing Containers Into Katello“. Before his contribution, users could already synchronize repositories of type “docker” from a remote source into Foreman / Katello. Now, one can directly push individual container Now, one can directly push individual container images toa “docker” repository in Foreman / Katello based on their name or ID This simplifies distributing custom container images because you no longer must push them to a third-party registry beforehand.
Conclusion
We had a fantastic time together and enjoyed the personal chit chat and off-the-record talks in our coffee breaks with fellow community members. Everybody took the opportunity to talk about community discussions, open PRs and upcoming changes in our ecosystem. We look forward to EL10 and Pulp 4.
We thank everyone who contributed their great talks to Foreman Birthday Party 2024. As a thank you, ATIX invited all speakers to a dinner at a local Bavarian Biergarten the day before where we enjoyed Bier and Schweinebraten.
You can find the agenda and the presentations in the Foreman Community Forum.
See you next year!
Maximilian Kolb and Markus Reisner!
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