Due to recent changes in the worker configuration of the SUSE internal openQA instance, we needed to reconfigure some of the PowerPC jobs in openQA. This triggered a couple of questions regarding the availability of openQA worker, worker backends, their differences and their caveats. This blog post should act as a quickstart/overview guide for people getting into OpenQA testing on the PowerPC architecture.
[Read More]openqa-mq shows you openQA's RabbitMQ events
openqa-mq
is a small CLI tool that receives openQA related events from RabbitMQ. It is part of the openqa-mon
packages and will work for OSD and for OOO.
Paste text on VNC terminal
A coworker recently faced the problem to copy&pasting a large amount of text into a VNC terminal for openQA. VNC doesn’t always allow copy&paste and when you have to manually type a longer string this is prone to typos and human error.
[Read More]Upgrade a PostgreSQL container to a new major version
PostgreSQL is a capable and mature database, which comes in a major or minor version number (e.g. 16.0
). Minor releases never change the internal storage, so the database always remains compatible with earlier and later minor releases. However major version releases do not have such a guarentee. We are running a single PostgreSQL database as a podman
container and I recently (today) had the glorious task of migrating this database to the next major version. In this blog post I describe how we did this migration.
CLI: Check if there are jobs running
I recently automated the installation of updates on my openQA development instance. The goal was to make the instance updates itself over night, but only if it is idle, i.e. there are no running jobs. Sometimes when I’m busy, the instance needs to work overnight and despite openQA being able to restart cancelled jobs from a reboot, I prefer to avoid situations where this might result in problems in times, where I really can’t have that.
[Read More]openQA: Could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted
I recently encountered a new interesting openQA issue:
[2023-03-13T14:18:22.651705+01:00] [warn] [pid:18929] !!! : qemu-system-x86_64: -netdev tap,id=qanet0,ifname=tap3,script=no,downscript=no: could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted
This is an error that you likely are encountering on a older openQA instance, after you setup multimachine jobs but haven’t used them in a while. For me the solution was to grant the CAP_NET_ADMIN
capabilities to the qemu binary (again):
VM test cluster using JeOS/MinimalVM images
JeOS (Just enough OS) or MinimalVM images are minimal VM images (duh!) that can be used to quickly deploy VMs. Instead of a installation you only need to go through a first boot setup. This makes those images very handy if you need to spin up a bunch of test VMs as for instance if you need a custom cluster.
[Read More]Safely clone a job on a production instance
When developing new openQA tests you will have to run a lot of verification and debug test runs. This is why I typically encourage people to do all openQA testing on their own instances, to prevent spamming of the production instances.
[Read More]molecule and systemd and cgroupns
It’s Hackweek and I’m back at working on the GeekOops project. One of the more annoying tasks that I have been postponing already since some time is to adjust the molecule workflow to work with cgroups 2.
[Read More]Reviewing openQA jobs with openqa-revtui
The openqa-revtui
tool is a neat CLI utility for helping you review openQA jobs and job groups.
It is part of the openqa-mon
project, which has grown in the last years and now consists on more than the job monitoring tool itself.