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Archive for April, 2018

Highlights of YaST Development Sprint 55

April 24th, 2018 by

Time flies. We are almost in May and the openSUSE Conference ’18 is around the corner. So after booking your flights (if you need to) and your acommodation, you might want to know what happened in the YaST world during the Development Sprint 55th.

The YaST team is currently polishing the upcoming release, introducing some improvements and fixes. There are no breaking changes but still we have a lot of things to blog about.

Updating NFS Version Handling

Once upon a time, back in 2008 to be precise, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally ready, Raúl Castro replaced Fidel as President of Cuba, the TV show Phineas and Ferb was previewed… and yast2-nfs-client added support to configure NFSv4 mounts. Back then, the proper way of doing that was using “nfs4” as type for mounting the NFS share, i.e. writing “nfs4” in the vfstype column of the /etc/fstab file. Some time later, NFS4.1 (also known as pNFS) came out, and a new mount option “minorversion=1” was added. Very soon it was clear that such solution was not scaling and was not the way to go.

So at some point “nfs4” was deprecated as acceptable value for vfstype and “minorversion” was ditched in favor of “nfsvers”. Since the old deprecated way of doing things was still working, yast2-nfs-client was never updated to reflect this. But starting with the upcoming Leap 15 and SLE 15, some things will change in NFSland (in fact, the change landed in openSUSE Tumbleweed some time ago already). The type “nfs4” will be considered identical to “nfs” and “minorversion” will be completely ignored, so your old NFS mounts may not work as you expect them to do it. Time to refresh yast2-nfs-client!

During this sprint, yast2-nfs-client was not only fixed internally to produce valid entries in /etc/fstab, it also got a slightly revamped form to create and edit NFS mounts that should be less confusing than the old one and also more explanatory about how NFS versioning really works when defining a mount.

NFS version selection

To ensure our users don’t get fooled by old entries that seems to be enforcing a particular NFS version (because they use “nfs4” as mount type, for example), but are in fact not doing it due to the new behavior in SLE 15 and openSUSE 15, yast2-nfs-client is now able to detect such circumstance, mark such entries in the list and offer a safe migration path to users.

nfs4 warning

As you can infer from the screenshot above, all these improvements are available when yast2-nfs-client runs standalone, as well as when it runs embedded within the YaST Partitioner. Enjoy!

Fixing Broken Translations

Recently we got some bug reports about YaST crashing at some points when running in some specific locales. It turned out that the problem was caused by broken translations.

A lot of translated texts contain placeholders like %s, %{text} or %1. These tags are replaced by the real values by YaST. But that requires that the translated text contains the same tags. If they are missing the value will not be included and, what is even worst, if they are invalid the Ruby interpreter throws an exception which means YaST aborts making our users unhappy. And that’s really bad, right?

Unfortunately the Ruby gettext does not support format tags and the GNU gettext does not support Ruby at all. As a quick solution we wrote a script which checks whether all tags are included in the translated text and reports broken translations.

The script found about 160 broken translations. The most common problems were usually just typos (s% instead of %s, {%foo} instead of %{foo}, or extra space in %␣1). But some cases were not that trivial. Translators by mistake also used the Unicode ٪ instead of the ASCII % or even translated the tags, which must stay untouched (%{مساعدة}).

Some translations were obviously wrong or even contained the original English texts – we removed them. In some cases the tags were wrong but we were not sure whether the whole translation is valid. In that case instead of fixing the tags we removed the translated text completely. It is better to ask the translators for translating again than have a completely invalid translation.

In the future we plan to improve these checks, so the tags are properly handled by Ruby and/or GNU gettext directly and we do not need a separate script for that.

Installing Over VNC Using the Browser

You are surely accustomed to remote administration using SSH. And, as you may know, the (open)SUSE installation can be done over SSH too. But, additionally, YaST also have support for installing over VNC.

When using VNC for installation, you can choose between using a native VNC viewer or a web browser based one. The cool thing about the second option, is that you can follow the installation just pointing your browser to http://IP-ADDRESS:5801.

Until now, YaST was using a Java applet based implementation, which is no longer supported in browsers. But during this sprint, we have completed the switch to a JavaScript based solution.

Unfortunately, that has resulted in losing an encryption layer: the HTTP connection on port 5801 is unencrypted, but the typical VNC port (5901) continues to be encrypted.

Asking Once About Equivalent Licenses

After splitting SUSE Linux Enterprise in several modules, it was pretty common that the user had to accept a couple of equivalent licenses during the installation process. Given that the content for those licenses was pretty much the same, it was quite confusing. Actually, we got a bug report about the installation process being stuck asking the user to accept the license over and over (it was just the same license being shown for different modules).

In order to make our users happy, YaST is now able to decide whether two licenses are the same and, in that case, it will only ask once for acceptance. For the time being, YaST applies a hash function to license contents and compare the result, but most likely this mechanism will be refined in the future.

License Confirmation in CaaSP 3.0

And talking about licenses, another small change about how they are handled was introduced in CaaSP 3.0. As you know, CaaSP features a One Dialog Installer and there was no room for the license to be shown. Now, before proceeding with the installation, YaST will show the license in the confirmation screen if needed.

CaaSP 3.0 License Confirmation Popup

Improving the addon Boot Option Handling

Back in February, we improved the addon boot option to handle the SUSE Linux Packages DVD properly. However, during testing, we found out that if you are using a system which only has one DVD drive, the installation DVD will be automatically used as an addon.

In order to fix this conflict, if the installation media and the Packages DVD are going to use the same drive, YaST will ask the user to change the DVD before using it as an addon.

Additionally, we improved the documentation of the addon boot option adding new examples to clarify how the dvd:/// URLs are handled.

Echoes of Winter: White Text on a White Background

These days we fixed a bug that only allowed clairvoyant users to finish the installation of openSUSE Kubic.

The bug is pretty unremarkable but may we draw your attention to the related CSS styling engine? It powers the high-contrast color mode that you can select with F3 or with Y2STYLE:

Linuxrc Color Mode Selection

Installer in High Contrast Mode

and if you press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S (for style) you can change the styling on the fly, as in this example of changing the background color:

Installer Stylesheet Editor

Conclusions

openSUSE Leap 15.0 release is approaching and, as usual, we need help from our dear users to give testing versions a try and report bugs. Thanks in advance!

Highlights of YaST Development Sprint 54

April 11th, 2018 by

We were in the middle of rewriting no, refactoring recompiling all of YaST into Visual Basic when we found that it was April 2nd already and had to scratch the entire project. Next year for sure. So you are left with a report of enterprise grade stabilization and we hope that your servers will be very bored running our software.

Installation and Upgrade

Clearer Description of Migration Targets

Life goes through various roads and it is same for SLE life. SLE15 is now split into multiple modules and during the upgrade it can be quite complex to pick the desired upgrade target. We have to react to this issue as customers start complaining that the upgrade overview starts to be hard to understand and we should improve it. So we did it and now you can check the changes on the attached screenshots. We modified the overview label from listing all products to just a summary with the details displayed below as it was before. Be aware that in the future and for some products or extensions/modules more migration targets will be possible.

Old screenshot:

and the new one (for a slightly different system, so it is not an exact match for the previous screenshot):

Importing the SMT Server SSL Certificate at Upgrade

We are still improving and fixing bugs in the migration from the SLE11 or SLE12 products to the new SLE15 line. One issue we fixed this sprint was importing the SSL server certificate from the old system at upgrade.

For registration you can use a local SMT server (Subscription Management Tool) instead of the usual SCC server (SUSE Customer Center).

The SMT servers usually use a self-signed SSL certificate to save some money for buying a real certificate signed by a well-known certificate authority. This self-signed certificate is imported to the system by YaST during the initial registration so the registration process and the repositories from the server can be properly accessed.

But during the offline upgrade to SLE15 the old system is not running, the installer runs from the installation medium. In that case we need to import the SSL certificate from the old system to the installer so it can properly access the registration server and do the upgrade.

The certificate import is quite easy, we just need to be careful as SLE11 uses a different (old) path for storing the imported certificates than in SLE12 or SLE15.

As the result you should be now able not only to upgrade the systems registered against the SCC server but also the systems registered against your local SMT server.

Many System Roles

Various products that we’re able to install have grown so many groups of presets, called System Roles, that they no longer fit on the screen. We applied some dark gray magic to make them fit in a scrollable box, at the expense of losing the keyboard shortcuts, sorry.

Storage

Better Message for Multipath (and other) Problems

While scanning the storage hardware, or at a later stage while manipulating it, there is always a chance of finding problems in the system that make it very hard to continue with the installation or the execution of YaST. In that case, previous versions of storage-ng used to show you a pop-up message with some technical details about what went wrong (for example, the command that failed and its output) and with options to abort YaST or continue despite the error.

But we found that for some situations we could do better in trying to understand what went wrong and explain it to you, instead of directly showing those raw technical details. One clear example is finding the same LVM physical volume twice, something that should never happen. Apart from double vision problems (libstorage-ng doesn’t drink alcohol), the most likely cause is that a multipath system is not being correctly detected and thus every one of the connections to the disk is being detected as a different disk, duplicating the content in the eyes of YaST.

Now such a circumstance is detected and explained to you, advising to use LIBSTORAGE_MULTIPATH_AUTOSTART (see linuxrc documentation) or the corresponding entry in the AutoYaST profile if it has not been used. By the way, during this sprint we also instructed storage-ng about LIBSTORAGE_MULTIPATH_AUTOSTART, since it used to ignore that ancient libstorage modifier.

The technical details are still available under the "Details" button, as you can see below. They are simply not displayed at first sight, which should make the whole experience less daunting for less-experienced users. That change applies to all the severe errors found during the three critical phases of storage-ng: hardware activation, system probing, and commit (when the partitions and other devices are created).

Of course, the new pop-up messages have full support for AutoYaST. The most appropriate default option (continue or abort) is automatically selected depending on which one of the mentioned phases is being executed and, if AutoYaST is configured to display pop-ups, the usual countdown is displayed before doing such selection. See below the new generic error (for a different, unidentified problem) in action in AutoYaST.

AutoYaST is now Able to Reuse Encrypted Devices

As you may know, AutoYaST is quite flexible when it comes to partitioning, so we are still writing the final bits of the adaptation with the new storage layer. And this time, we were working on teaching AutoYaST how to reuse encrypted devices properly.

However, the implementation was not that straightforward, as the hardware probing occurs even before the partitioning section of the profile has been analyzed. And, in some scenarios, it is not clear which key should be used to unlock a device (for instance, this can happen when more than one encryption key is defined). To solve this problem, AutoYaST will try all defined keys on all encrypted devices until a working key is found.

Of course, this behavior is properly documented now in the AutoYaST handbook.

Miscellaneous

Fixed AutoYaST profiles validation issues.

In our previous blog entry we already mentioned that there are significant changes between SLE12 and SLE15 profiles which have been documented in this appendix.

It is very common to adapt the profiles by hand which is error-prone and sometimes it is also hard to identify where the errors are just running an installation and looking deeply into the logs. That is why profiles validation using xmllint or jing is recommended (more info here).

During this sprint we have fixed some errors with the cloned profiles after installation which were not validating.

Translation Issues

We are receiving quite a lot of bugs regarding the translations. The usual problem is that some text is not translated at all and the original English text is displayed. This sprint we fixed several issues in this area, two of them are worth sharing in the blog.

The XSL File Format

The first problem was reported for missing translations in the role descriptions in the SLES4SAP product. The SLES4SAP installation basically behaves like the standard SLES installation just with changed few defaults. To avoid the duplication and make the SLES4SAP maintenance easier we simply take the original SLES XML control file, which describes the installer behavior and the defaults, and change just few values using a XSL transformation into the resulting SLES4SAP installer control file.

It turned out that the roles with missing translations were located in that XSL file. And unfortunately YaST did not support extracting the translatable strings from XSL files. However, we support translations in XML files and because a XSL file is actually a valid XML file we could easily extend the translation support in YaST to also cover the XSL files. So now the SLES4SAP roles are correctly translated.

Missing textdomain Call

We fixed several bugs with missing translations which were caused by missing textdomain call in the code. This call defines which POT file should be loaded and searched for the translations. If the YaST code does not use this call then obviously no text can be translated as YaST does not know which POT file should be used and it silently used the original untranslated text.

That means it was quite difficult to find why some text was not translated. And because that was quite common bug we had a nice idea to improve the situation by logging a warning into the YaST log with the exact message which could not be translated. And more importantly the log now also contains the location of the code which was trying to use the translation wrongly. See the pull request for more details.

With the openQA team we discussed also the possibility to add a new check to openQA which would scan the YaST log for this particular warning and report a problem. Which means we should not overlook this quite important warning in the future.