Beaker interface for administrators¶

Groups¶

In addition to the groups functionality available to all users (see Groups), administrators have access to certain extra features.

If LDAP is configured for identity management (identity.ldap.enabled in the server configuration file), you can flag a group’s membership to be populated from LDAP. If this flag is set, Beaker will not allow users to be added or removed from the group manually. Instead, a cron job runs the beaker-refresh-ldap command periodically to refresh group membership from LDAP. Administrators with command line access to the main Beaker server may also run beaker-refresh-ldap directly to force an immediate update from the LDAP server.

You can also grant special system-wide permissions to groups. These permissions would typically only be granted to special groups for service accounts or privileged users. The following permissions are defined:

tag_distro

Permitted to tag and untag distros.

distro_expire

Permitted to remove a distro’s association with a lab controller.

secret_visible

Permitted to view all systems, including other users’ systems which are marked as “Secret”.

stop_task

Permitted to stop, cancel, or abort jobs or recipe sets owned by any user.

change_prio

Permitted to increase or decrease the priority of any user’s job.

OS versions¶

The “OS Versions” page shows a list of the major and minor versions of every distro that has been imported into Beaker. Select Admin ‣ OS Versions from the menu.

To edit a particular OS major version, click its name in the first column. From this page you can edit the following details:

Alias

If set, the alias can be used to refer to this OS major version in the Releases field of task metadata (see Releases). This is intended mainly as a compatibility mechanism for older tasks which use an obsolete name in the Releases field (for example RHEL3 instead of RedHatEnterpriseLinux3).

Cannot import distro as RHEL6: it is configured as an alias for RedHatEnterpriseLinux6

Install Options

These are the default install options when provisioning a distro from this major version. Options may be set for all arches or for each arch individually. Options at this level are overridden by any options set at the distro tree level. See Install options for details about the meaning of these options.

Configuration¶

Some Beaker configuration is stored in the database rather than in the server configuration file, and can be changed without restarting Beaker services. Select Admin ‣ Configuration from the menu to view and change settings.

Export¶

The Admin ‣ Export menu item allows an administrator to export data about the systems and user groups as CSV files. Currently, the following data can be exported:

Systems

For every system, its FQDN, its deletion and secret status, lender, location, MAC address, memory, model, serial, vendor, supported architectures, lab controller, owner, status, type and cc fields are exported.

Systems (for modification)

In addition to the above fields, this also exports the database identifier for each system. This is useful when you want to rename existing systems (see Import).

System LabInfo

For every system, the original cost, current cost, dimensions, weight, wattage and cooling data about its lab is exported. If there is no such data available for this system, the corresponding system entry is not exported.

System Power

For every system, the power address, username and password, power id and power type are exported.

System Excluded Families

The data for systems which are excluded from running jobs requiring certain families of operating systems are exported. The fields exported are the FQDN of the system and the details about the operating system (architecture, family and the update) which is excluded.

System Install Options

The data for the systems with custom install options are exported. The fields exported are the FQDN of the system, architecture, the operating system family (and update) and the corresponding install options: ks-meta, kernel options and post kernel options.

System Key/Values

For every system, its key value pairs are exported.

System Pools

Systems which belong to a system pool are exported along with the corresponding pool names.

User Groups

The users and the groups which they are a member of are exported.

Import¶

The Admin ‣ Import option is useful for two workflows:

1. Administrator exports the data from a Beaker instance (see Export), makes some changes and uploads the modified file to the same Beaker instance.
2. Administrator exports the data from a Beaker instance (see Export) and uses it to setup a new Beaker instance (with or without making any changes to the exported data).

The first workflow updates the data about one or more existing systems or users. For the data related to the systems, the system FQDN is used to look up the system in Beaker’s database. If however, a system is to be renamed, then the “Systems (for modification)” data should be used since it also exports the database identifier for the system (the corresponding field name is “id”) which is then used to look up the system in Beaker’s database.

The second workflow is useful when the same set of systems or user groups should be present in a different Beaker instance. In this case, the data exported by “Systems (for modification)” should not be used since data about the existing systems may be accidentally overwritten.