Beaker

What’s New in Beaker 0.11?

Backwards-incompatible changes

In previous versions of Beaker, shell metacharacters in custom repo URLs were not escaped when writing to /etc/yum.repos.d. In particular, if your custom repo URL contained a yum variable, it had to be escaped as \$ to prevent bash from interpreting it. This escaping is no longer necessary. See bug #%s880039 for full details.

New reporting and metrics features

Beaker now includes a number of “supported” reporting queries, which can be used for in-depth historical analysis of your Beaker installation. See Reporting from the Beaker database for full details. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan and Raymond Mancy in #%s193142, #%s591656, #%s741960, #%s877264, #%s877272, #%s877274.)

Beaker’s integration with the Graphite real-time metrics tool, originally added in version 0.9.4, has also been expanded. See Integration with Graphite for details about the metrics Beaker sends to Graphite. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan and Nick Coghlan in #%s584783, #%s695986, #%s839583).

If you are using an external reporting tool with your Beaker installation, you can add links to the reports on the new External Reports page. (Contributed by Raymond Mancy in #%s883606.)

Documentation improvements

  • Beaker’s documentation is now in reStructuredText format and is built using Sphinx. It was also re-arranged to improve clarity.
  • The Creating a task section has been improved and updated to describe using beaker-wizard. (Contributed by Amit Saha in #%s872428.)
  • New sections were added to the Administration Guide describing Graphite integration and reporting queries. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan and Nick Coghlan.)
  • The Installation Guide was removed in favour of targeted instructions in the User and Administration Guides. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan.)

Other enhancements

  • Default install options can be applied to an entire distro family. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s873714.)
  • New kickstart snippet, timezone, allowing administrators to customize the default timezone per lab. (Contributed by Bill Peck in #%s876582.)
  • Users can change their own Beaker account password, if their account is using password authentication. (Contributed by Raymond Mancy in #%s865676.)
  • The bkr machine-test command will avoid scheduling recipes with distro families which are excluded for that system. (Contributed by Bill Peck in #%s876752.)
  • New kickstart metadata variable, fstype, to control filesystem type used during installation. The distro default is used if no explicit filesystem type is requested. (Contributed by Jun’ichi NOMURA in #%s865679.)
  • New kickstart metadata variable, linkdelay, to add LINKDELAY to network interface configuration files. (Contributed by Jun’ichi NOMURA in #%s865680.)
  • Lab controller daemons use python-daemon for daemonizing. (Contributed by James de Vries in #%s813574.)
  • Transaction handling and exception handling in beakerd is cleaner and simpler. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s880853.)

Bug fixes

The following bugs were fixed in Beaker 0.11.0:

  • #%s843854: Clearing netboot config during post-install needs to be synchronous
  • #%s869455: Submitting a job with <package/> results in database error: (OperationalError) (1048, “Column ‘job_id’ cannot be null”)
  • #%s869758: Custom repos using yum variables (such as $basearch) cause installation to fail
  • #%s872001: Orphaned rendered_kickstart rows are not deleted
  • #%s875535: CPU flag filtering in hostRequires does not work
  • #%s880039: Shell metacharacters in repo URLs are not escaped correctly when written to /etc/yum.repos.d
  • #%s880424: Identity extension fails to start during beaker-server RPM upgrade
  • #%s880899: op attribute is declared as mandatory in beaker-job.rng for many elements where it is not actually mandatory
  • #%s881563: Missing schema upgrade note to make recipe.recipe_set_id and recipe_set.job_id not NULLable
  • #%s883214: CPU speed filtering in hostRequires does not work when given a float value
  • #%s883668: Watchdog starts monitoring console too early in multi-host recipe sets
  • #%s885554: beakerd aborts recipes which have no systems, even if they could be satisfied by oVirt/RHEV
  • #%s888673: System can be returned from the system page while a recipe is running on it

The following bug was fixed in Beaker 0.11.1:

  • #%s896622: Submitting a job with <packages/> results in database error: (OperationalError) (1048, “Column ‘recipe_id’ cannot be null”)

The following bug was fixed in Beaker 0.11.2:

  • #%s903893: Guest MAC address conflicts when guest recipe finishes before host recipe

The following bugs were fixed in Beaker 0.11.3:

  • #%s902659: oVirt incompatible recipes are incorrectly reported in the Graphite metrics as “dynamic_virt_possible”
  • #%s903442: Temporary workaround for #%s807237 (recipe Running when all tasks are Completed)
  • #%s907297: bkr.common.krb_auth.get_encoded_request() incorrectly guesses host portion of service principal
  • #%s907307: Dynamic virt should be precluded for non i386/x86_64 arches

Compatibility issues with Jinja 2.6 and SQLAlchemy 0.7 were also fixed in Beakeer 0.11.0.