What’s New in Beaker 0.18?¶

Usage reminder emails¶

A new server side command beaker-usage-reminder is now available, which sends emails to users to help them keep track of their usage. The emails warn about:

• Reservations which are ending soon
• Reservations which have been held for a long time and are blocking other jobs
• Jobs which have been queued for a long time

Beaker administrators can set up a cron job on the Beaker server to send reminders at regular intervals using this program. Refer to beaker-usage-reminder for more details.

This command replaces the previous beaker-nag-mail command.

(Contributed by Matt Jia in #%s994325.)

Pre-defined host filters for workflow commands¶

A new option --host-filter is available for bkr workflow commands to specify a pre-defined host filter. You can use pre-defined host filters as a short-hand for complicated or difficult to remember XML snippets. A number of host filters are included with the bkr client, and users can also define their own host filters.

(Contributed by Amit Saha in #%s1081390.)

Better support for custom distros¶

Custom distros (that is, distros which use the Anaconda installer but identify themselves as something other than Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or CentOS) are now treated as equivalent to the latest Fedora release by default. Previously it was not possible to use custom distros in Beaker without supplying a custom kickstart template (and in some cases, modifying the Beaker source code).

There are also a number of new kickstart metadata variables relating to distro features. Administrators can override these variables per OS version, and snippet authors can use the variables in conditional blocks to handle distro differences.

(Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1070597 and #%s1132764.)

Notable changes¶

{% if has_systemd is defined %}
systemctl ...
{% endif %}

Other new features and enhancements¶

When Beaker’s experimental OpenStack integration integration is enabled, the beaker-watchdog daemon now captures and stores the serial console log for recipes running on dynamic VMs. (Contributed by Matt Jia in #%s950903.)

The bkr job-logs command has a new option --size to print the size of each log file in the listing. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1128048.)

The scheduler feature which increases the priority of any recipe matching a single system can now be disabled by setting beaker.priority_bumping_enabled = False in /etc/beaker/server.cfg. It remains enabled by default. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s978904.)

A new query for computing utilization for a particular system (or set of systems) has been added to the supported reporting queries. (Contributed by Amit Saha in #%s1117681.)

Task and harness updates¶

Version 4.64 of the rhts test development and execution library has been released, with two changes:

• AVC checking is skipped if SELinux is not enabled. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s1126266.)
• When building a task RPM from a git repository, git archive is used to produce a pristine tarball. Uncommitted modifications in the work tree are no longer included in the task RPM. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan #%s1109960.)

Version 1.2-4 of the /distribution/inventory task has been released. The task will now warn if the system’s hardware virtualization features have been disabled in firmware. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan in #%s738881.)

Bug fixes¶

A number of bug fixes are also included in this release.

• #%s1108498: The grubport kickstart metadata variable now takes effect on EFI-based systems. (Contributed by Jun’ichi NOMURA)
• #%s1132730: When a group is deleted, any system access policy rules for that group are also deleted. These rule deletions are now reflected in the system activity log. (Contributed by Amit Saha)
• #%s1132729: The Remove button on the My Groups page has been re-labelled Delete Group to make its function clearer. (Contributed by Amit Saha)
• #%s1120052: When the scheduler determines that a multi-host recipe set cannot be satisfied because not enough systems are available, under some circumstances the recipe set would fail to abort and become stuck in the Processed state. Such recipe sets are now correctly aborted by the scheduler. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1132763: The beaker-repo-update command now skips symlinks in the harness repo directory, rather than attempting to update them. (Contributed by Dan Callaghan)
• #%s1121763: The markup on the system page has been adjusted to make it easier to copy the system FQDN from the page header. (Contributed by Matt Jia)

Maintenance updates¶

The following fixes have been included in Beaker 0.18 maintenance updates.