openQA bites

Updating perltidy (and other dependencies) in os-autoinst

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:17:05 +0100

When updating the dependencies.yaml file in os-autoinst, e.g. when you’d like to fix the outdated perltidy version in the repo the recommended workflow is to:

Update dependencies.yaml
Run make update-deps

This will update the cpanfile for you and you only need to make your changes in one single file (dependencies.yaml).

openQA and PowerPC

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 11:14:48 +0100

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.

openqa-mq shows you openQA's RabbitMQ events

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 07:55:19 +0200

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

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 10:06:56 +0100

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.

Upgrade a PostgreSQL container to a new major version

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 23 Nov 2023 16:09:52 +0100

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

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 05 May 2023 09:32:47 +0200

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.

openQA: Could not configure /dev/net/tun (tap3): Operation not permitted

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 14:58:18 +0100

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

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 14:41:06 +0100

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.

Safely clone a job on a production instance

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 14:42:22 +0200

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.

molecule and systemd and cgroupns

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 16:17:26 +0100

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.

Reviewing openQA jobs with openqa-revtui

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 09:12:16 +0100

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.

openQA: emulated aarch64 worker

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:29:20 +0200

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.

openqa: asset download request but no domains passlisted

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 13:23:55 +0200

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

molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 13:39:07 +0200

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:

BCI test tutorial

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 13:23:42 +0200

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 - display current SUSE publiccloud images in your terminal

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 19 May 2022 09:57:43 +0200

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 an aarch64 image in qemu

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 13 Apr 2022 09:50:46 +0200

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.

openQA and dehydrated

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 16:52:35 +0200

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.

Fix the "Wrong version of perltidy" issue in tools/tidy

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 10:32:23 +0100

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.

VS Code and poetry

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 14:13:55 +0100

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.

Booting custom Azure VM images

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 16:03:48 +0100

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.

Extract SCHEDULE from an openQA job

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 13:46:51 +0100

Then using openqa-clone-job (and derivates) one can use the SCHEDULE variable to clone a test run with a custom set of test modules. This is particular useful, when developing a new test case and you need a verification run with e.g. an additional test module or to exclude some failing ones. However it is sometimes cumbersome to type out a large list of tests into a custom SCHEDULE variable, if the amount of test modules exceeds 5 or more tests (e.g. extra_tests_textmode - good luck!).

Windows VM and Hyper-V (nested virtualization)

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 15:54:43 +0100

In this encore to the Run Azure images in Hyper-V or kvm will briefly discuss, if it is possible to create your own Hyper-V Windows Hypervisor as a kvm guest on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Run Azure images in Hyper-V or kvm

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 14:00:11 +0100

Disclaimer: This blog post is about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server images on Azure and probably only useful to SUSE Employees who work with such images.

Container Layer Analyzer

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 10:28:41 +0100

Today I’d like to point out an amazing new tool: The Container Layer Analyzer, written by Dan Čermák. Dan also wrote a comprehensive blog post about it, which explains it much better than what I do here.

Clean empty job groups in openQA

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 09:51:26 +0100

In this blog post I present you a small script, which can help you to remove empty job groups from your own openQA instance. This is helpful if you have a development instance with a lot of job groups, that you never use. This script can help you to tidy the list of dangling job groups.

Playing with the openqa API

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:00:00 +0200

Today we are going to play a bit around with the amazing API that every openQA instance provides. The aim of this tutorial is to show how the API can be accessed using a simple language like python. More advanced topics like job posting, deletion and other methods that require authentication are possible but not covered extensively in this post. The reference for this post will be openqa.opensuse.org, but everything works pretty much with every openQA instance.

openqa-cli Cheatsheet

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 10:11:22 +0200

Checkout the new openqa-cli cheat sheet page where I start to collect some useful “how do I do …” snippets for the openQA CLI utility openqa-cli.

openqa-cli cheat sheet

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 13:46:21 +0200

openqa-cli is a command-line utility for interacting with openQA. The tool is versatile and allows you to control and interact with an arbitrary openQA instance from the comfort of your command line. While the internal help is quiet comprehensive, I list some of the most basic tasks in the form of a tutorial or knowledge base here.

Use local go modules

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 10:58:14 +0200

When dealing with go modules, sometimes it’s handy to test some changes from a local repository instead of using the upstream one.

Now, go programs are typically relying only on the upstream packages. Take the module file of openqa-mon as example:

pasta - stupid simple pastebin service

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 10:13:55 +0200

pasta is a stupid simple pastebin service for self-hosting. I started this project months ago because I was missing an easy, simple and no pain self-hosting solution. This is what pasta is about. You just throw a file at it via it’s archaic web interface, a simple POST request or with its stupid simple CLI tool:

Hidden gem - Show failures only in external results

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 12 May 2021 09:25:29 +0200

I just recently discovered one of the hidden gems in the openQA WebUI: Show only failing tests in external results.

Hide IDE folders in git using a global gitignore

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 10:52:47 +0200

Integrated development environemnts (IDE) are using their own folders within your code repositories to store their settings. This can become annoying when working on a git repository and they keep popping up as untracked files:

IPMI remote access on old machines

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 16:06:48 +0200

This is a very short update post about getting the IPMI Remote Control Java Applet from horrible old system running on modern systems. This is an issue that haunted me for some time.

about openQA-bites

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 16:18:27 +0100

openQA bites is a blog about tutorials, insights and love stories from a simple openQA developer. It aims to provide small and bite-sized posts about typical usage issues that every openQA dev encounters and atypical corner-cases that are worth to be written down. In the best case it can complement the official openQA documentation. by sharing some stories and make some typical and atypical use cases searchable in via your search engine of choice.

Active monitoring of openQA jobs

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 14:54:57 +0100

openqa-mon is a little command-line utility to monitor one or multiple openQA jobs for their status. This tool is useful if you want to live monitor a handful of jobs closely e.g. for verification runs.

What are Needles

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 09:57:30 +0100

In this blog post we are going to give you the easiest introduction to what needles are and how you can use them. While there are many good talks and documentation on needles out there, it took me longer than it should have to find a easy-to-use and easy-to-understand introduction into this topic alone. This blog post should fill this gap.

Background bash commands

felix.niederwanger@suse.de (phoenix) — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 14:50:02 +0100

This post describes the caveats and correct handling of the bash background operator within openQA.