openQA bites

Are you in dire need of an aarch64 worker on your own openQA instance, but no suitable hardware lying around? If speed is not your main concern, then don’t worry - you can just enable a qemu-emulated aarch64 worker on your openQA instance (probably x86_64). In this post we’re gonna explore how to setup an emulated aarch64 qemu worker on your own openQA instance in less than 10 minutes.

Symptom

When posting a job using , you see an error message of the following kind:

$ openqa-cli api -X POST isos ...
403 Forbidden
Asset download requested but no domains passlisted! Set download_domains.

Solution

Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

So, while hacking on the geekoops roles, molecule test was complaining on my Tumbleweed machine:

Base Container Images (BCI) are a SUSE offer for a variety of container images suitable for building custom applications atop of the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). They are a suitable building platform for different container applications and are available for free without subscription. In this blog post I’m covering how we test BCI before they are released and how you can run individual tests on them.

seidl is a small pint query utility designed to easily list the current publiccloud images in the terminal. Pint (Public Cloud Information Tracker) is the SUSE service to provide data about the current state of publiccloud images across all supported public cloud service providers. The public-cloud-info-client is an already existing versitale client, however I find its usage a bit bulky if it comes to the task of displaying the current images. This is where seidl complements the existing client. See for yourself:

Running a x86_64 image in qemu machine can be as easy as:

qemu-system-x86_64 openSUSE-Leap-15.3-JeOS.x86_64-kvm-and-xen.qcow2

# A more extended example
qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1G -cpu host -enable-kvm -smp cores=2,threads=1,sockets=1 -drive file=openSUSE-Leap-15.3-JeOS.x86_64-kvm-and-xen.qcow2,if=virtio

Doing the same for aarch64 is a bit more tricky. In this tutorial we’re gonna learn how to run a aarch64 vm using qemu. This approach works on native aarch64 hardware and as emulated VM on any other architectures as well.

In this blog post I’m gonna show you, how you can enable https for your openQA instance using dehydrated and the internal SUSE CA. The same procedure should also work for Let’s Encrypt.

A commen error when running tools/tidy in the openSUSE/SLES tests repository for openQA is the following error:

Wrong version of perltidy. Found '20211027', expected '20211029'.

This indicated a mismatch of the found vs. expected version of perltidy and the tidy script aborts to avoid inconsistent formatting between your PR and the CI pipeline. In Perl this is unfortunately necessary, as often a new version of perltidy formats the code differently. Yes, this is a source of constant struggle and one of the reasons why I dislike Perl (sorry for the mild rant).

poetry is (yet another) python packaging and dependency management system. In this blog post I’m gonna describe how I am working with poetry repositories within VS Codium, the freely licensed variant of VS Code.

This blog post ist about uploading a custom VM disk image to the Azure cloud and create a VM to boot from this image.

If you just want to upload a image, checkout the az_upload_img bash script at the very end of this post for a easy-to-use script without the need to dive into details.