NEWS.md

Razor Server Release Notes

0.16.1 - 2015-01-12

Other

• BUGFIX: Fixing a bug that would not allow new events to be created in the database due to a plugin conflict.

0.16.0 - 2015-01-05

Incompatible changes

• Tags will be unique in a case-insensitive manner. Previously, tags could have existed as e.g. 'mytag' and 'MyTag'. A migration in this release will rename conflicting tags, appending a digit to the end, e.g. 'mytag' and 'MyTag1'.
• The update-node-metadata command no longer accepts the all argument. This argument should have never been accepted by the command, and had no effect. Instead, modify-node-metadata can be called with either the clear argument to remove all keys, or the update argument to set all keys to certain values, which achieves the same function.

API changes

• create-hook and delete-hook are two new commands for managing hooks.
• events collection now displays events from the Razor server. This can be scoped by querying nodes/$name/log or hooks/$name/$log.
• Various collections can now be limited and offset by supplying limit and start parameters. These parameters can be discovered via the logically prior endpoint. For /api/collections/events, this is in /api. For /api/collections/nodes/$name/log, this is in /api/collections/nodes/$name.
• Help text now exists for razor-client in addition to just the API. This is accessible via a GET on the command's endpoint, where the new 'examples' key in the help text has 'api' and 'cli' as sub-keys.
• The create-repo command now accepts a --no-content argument, which signifies that neither the --iso-url nor the --url arguments will be supplied, and instead an empty directory will be created.
• create-tag is now idempotent.

Task changes

• NEW: Added Windows tasks for 2012R2.
• NEW: Added Ubuntu tasks for Lucid (10.04) and Trusty (14.04).
• NEW: Windows tasks can execute brokers.
• BUGFIX: Fixed existing Debian i386 task.
• IMPROVEMENT: Windows default task (8 pro) now utilizes node's root_password value rather than the default razor.
• IMPROVEMENT: Windows tasks now use newer wimboot (2.4.0)
• IMPROVEMENT: Debian and Ubuntu (Trusty only) can allow hostname without '.' for fetching preseed file.

Other

• NEW: Hooks. See hooks.md for details on how to write and use hooks.
• NEW: Separate API and CLI help examples: There are now two formats for help examples. The new CLI format shows help text as a standard razor-client command.
• IMPROVEMENT: Updating Torquebox to 3.1.1 and JRuby to 1.7.13.
• BUGFIX: Fixing heap space issues with default settings in Torquebox.
• IMPROVEMENT: Standardizing behavior for creating two entities whose names only differ in case.
• IMPROVEMENT: Adding idempotency in create-tag.
• NEW: Exposing IPMI details (username and hostname) in razor --full nodes.
• NEW: Provide warning in create-policy if the user attempts to create a tag, a feature which was removed in 0.15.0.
• IMPROVEMENT: create-broker now accepts argument c as an alias for configuration.
• NEW: Brokers can now use arbitrary executable files for installation, which is most helpful for Powershell in Windows.
• BUGFIX: Some attempts to contact Razor server are retried upon failure.
• BUGFIX: Disallowing old versions of Sinatra where download of initrd.gz would hang.

0.15.0 - 2014-05-22

Incompatible changes

• the way that tasks and templates are stored on disk has changed. All the builtin tasks have been updated to use the new layout; if you wrote your own custom tasks, you will have to adjust them as described on the migration page

  The task layout has changed in the following way:

  1. All files for a task name must now be in a directory {name}.task on the task_path configured in config.yaml; the task_path defaults to the tasks directory in the Razor source tree
  2. The metadata file for a task must now be located in {name}.task/metadata.yaml rather than {name}.yaml
  3. The search path for templates does not take the os_version of a task into account anymore, but simply relies on the name of the task, and that of base_tasks if the task inherits from another task. The search path for a template is now {name}.task:{base_task}.task: ... further base tasks ...:/common.

• create-repo now requires a task argument. The argument must be the name of an existing task; use razor tasks to get a list of tasks your server knows about.

• The create-policy function no longer creates tags in addition to creating a policy.

API Changes

• The version of the server is now included in the output of GET /api; this is not the version of the API, but simply the version of the server code and should not be used to determine capabilities of the API. It is simply included to ease bug reporting etc.
• A GET request against a command's URL now returns metadata about the command, including a help text and information about the accepted parameters.
• Commands now return the URL of a 'command' object that can be used to track the progress of the background work of a command, in particular that of the create-repo command. (RAZOR-7)
• All the create-* commands are now idempotent. When a create-* command is issued a second time, it will return an HTTP status of 202 if it is identical to the first create-* request, and a status of 409 Conflict if there are differences between the two. (RAZOR-185)
• The commands create-policy, create-repo, and move-policy now accept the short reference form, e.g. "task": "TASK_NAME" instead of "task": { "name": "TASK_NAME" }
• Changing a tag via update-tag-rule would not retag existing nodes to reflect the changes in the tag. (RAZOR-250) Furthermore, if evaluating a new tag against all nodes caused a failure against one node, retagging nodes erroneously stopped. Razor now logs the evaluation failure in the affected node's log and continues evaluating the tag against other nodes. (RAZOR-254)
• Validation of command parameters is now much more thorough and produces more consistent error messages
• When doing a delete-repo, clean the storage on disk used by the repo (RAZOR-202) Avoid requiring two tempfiles for each downloaded ISO (RAZOR-73)
• New commands
  • the set-node-hw-info command can be used to manually change he hardware info for a node used to identify it on boot, e.g. to reflect a hardware change
  • the register-node command can be used to manually preregister nodes and optionally mark them as installed and therefore ineligible for changes by Razor

Task changes

• fix error in preseed files for debian.task and ubuntu.task (RAZOR-121)
• fix an error in os_boot.erb for ubuntu.task when repository names contained underscores (Maish Saidel-Keesing, commit 669d9113)

Other

• Check that the database uses the version of the schema that the code expects; if that is not the case, all requests to the server will produce a '500 Internal error' with a friendly reminder to migrate the database.
• It is now possible to extend the Microkernel at runtime by providing a zip file with code that gets downloaded to the Microkernel. The microkernel.extension-zip configuration setting, if configured with the path of an existing zip file, will be downloaded and unpacked on the MK image before the agent runs. This allows runtime addition of facts to the MK without a rebuild of the ISO image. More details (based on work by Chris Portman)
• The way we identify nodes has seen some significant change: we treat the data that we gather from iPXE as provisional, and reidentify a node once it checks in from the Microkernel using facts. It is now possible to use some facts for node identification, controlled by facts.match_on, for example so that the UUID's of hard disks on a machine are ultimately used to identify the node. That ensures that even if the mainboard of a node is replaced that Razor will find that node again in its database. (based on work by Chris Portman) (RAZOR-174) (RAZOR-218)
• DHCP will be retried when it fails, to better support networks that take time to configure. (802.1x, trunking, and similar issues are common causes.) You need to regenerate the bootstrap.ipxe on your TFTP server to take advantage of that; you can retrieve that file by issuing a GET /api/microkernel/bootstrap on an updated server
• sanboot metadata field support: if this is set to (boolean) true in the node metadata, the sanboot workaround for firmware PXE booting bugs will be enabled on that specific node.
• By default, Razor considers all new nodes that it discovers as eligible for installation. Setting the protect_new_nodes configuration setting to true will mark all newly discovered nodes as "installed", causing them to boot locally and protecting them from any modifications by Razor until explicitly marked as available via reinstall-node. New nodes will still be inventoried when the boot against Razor for the very first time, but will boot locally thereafter.
• The matching language for rules now has upper and lower functions for converting a string to upper- and lower-case respectively.
• All human-readable messages are now localizable (using GNU gettext), though we only ship an English translation so far. The message catalog can be found in locales/ if you want to have a go at translating ;)
• Properly reboot nodes via IPMI, rather than turning the node off (commit d03fc713)

0.14.1 - 2014-02-03

Release notes are missing for this release

0.14.0 - 2014-01-30

Release notes are missing for this release

0.13.0 - 2014-01-21

• 'recipes' (neé installers) are now called 'tasks', as the word recipes is prominently used by Chef and would just lead to confusion
• IPMI support now allows rebooting nodes, and setting a desired power stat ('on' or 'off') which the server will enforce

Public API changes

• incompatible changes
  • the way how policy ordering is handled has changed: instead of exposing a rule_number that has to be set in create-policy, new policies are now by default appended to the policy table. Their position can be controlled with the before and after parameters to the create-policy command. The rule_number is not part of the view of a policy anymore either. To determine the order of policies, they need to be listed with /api/collections/policies which returns all policies in the order in which they are matched against a node
• the node object view has changed:
  • the node["state"]["power"] field is removed.
  • the node["power"] object is added with the fields:
    • "desired_power_state" reflecting the configured desired power state for the node
    • "last_known_power_state" reflecting the last observed power state
    • "last-power_state_update_at" reflecting the point in time that power state observation was taken.
  • it is important to note that this is not a real-time power state, but a scheduled observation; do not assume that the last known state reflects current reality.
• new commands
  • move-policy to move a policy before/after another policy
  • reboot-node to reboot a node via IPMI (soft and hard)
  • set-node-desired-power-state to indicate whether a node should be on or off and have Razor enforce that
  • delete-broker makes it possible to delete existing brokers
• policies can seed the metadata for nodes; this is set via the node_metadata parameter of the create-policy command (Chris Portmann)
• the details for a broker now have a policies collection which shows the policies using that broker
• the new puppet-pe broker allows seamless integration with the simplified installation in a forthcoming PE release

0.12.0 - 2014-01-03

• the server's management API underneath /api can now be protected with username/password. See the authentication page on the Wiki for details
• IPMI support (read-only in this release)
• "installers" are now called "recipes" as they will, in the future, be able to do more than just install operating systems
• nodes now carry metadata, a list of key/value pairs. Metadata works similar to facts, except that it is manipulated through the public API, and can be used in tag rules. Nodes can also store metadata values during installation
• nodes now have an explicit installed state which recipes have to set by calling stage_done_url("finished")
• a brand new chef broker [contributed by Egle Sigler]

Public API changes

• incompatible changes
  • collections now return an object instead of an array; the actual entries for the collection are in the 1tems property of that object
  • renaming of installers to recipes
• better navigation
  • tags now have subcollections for the nodes and policies that use them
  • policies have a subcollection for the nodes that are bound to them
  • the nodes collection can now be searched by hostname (with a regexp) and by the various hw_info fields (mac, serial, uuid, ...)
  • there is no a real recipes collection that lists all known recipes (file- and database-backed ones)
• new commands
  • set-node-ipmi-credentials to set up the details of a node's BMC/IPMI interface
  • modify-node-metadata, update-node-metadata, and remove_node_metadata commands to manipulate a node's metadata
  • modify-policy-max-count to manipulate the quota for a policy
  • reinstall-node to cause a node to go through the policy table again (used to be called unbind-node)
  • delete_policy to delete a policy; nodes that were bound to that policy and had finished installing will not be reinstalled
  • policy_add_tag and policy_remove_tag to associate/disassociate tags with/from a given policy
• nodes now report a status, including whether they are installed, and at what stage the installer for a possibly boubd policy is. If the node has IPMI credentials, the current power state is also reported

SVC (node/server) API

• add store_metadata_url helper

Tag language

• support a tag function that evaluates another tag so that existing tags can be reused on rules
• support a metadata function that retrieves values from the node's metadata
• support a state function. Currently only the installed state of a node can be queried
• add a boolean not operator

Other

• razor-admin now has a check-migrations command which checks if the database schema is up to date or not

0.11.0 - 2013-11-26

Public API changes

• include the installer and broker in the policy detail
• include the name of the base installer in the installer details
• new commands enable-policy and disable-policy
• new commands delete-tag and update-tag-rule

Installers

• add installer for ESXi 5.5
• add installer for Windows 8; details are on the Wiki
• Debian
  • support the new Debian 7.2 multiarch netboot CD, which includes and i386 and an amd64 kernel
• RHEL
  • properly set the BOOTIF argument; before kickstart could fail if a machine had multiple NICs because of this
  • use /etc/rc.d/rc.local, not /etc/rc.local in the post install script; the latter is simply a symlink and making changes to that will not be seen by the init scripts
• Ubuntu
  • Improved Precise (12.04 LTS) installer

Node/server API changes

• the broker_install_url helper now fetches the broker install script; the stock installers now run the broker install script
• the file_url helper now supports fetching raw files, not just interpolated templates
• the /svc/nodeid endpoint makes it possible for nodes to look up their Razor-internal node id from their hardware information

Configuration

• validate various aspects of the server configuration on startup
• updated facts.blacklist in config.yaml.sample
• new setting match_nodes_on to select which hardware attributes to match on when identifying a node. Defaults to mac

Other

• support repos that are merely references to content hosted somewhere else in addition to repos created by importing an ISO
• update to Sinatra 1.4.4; this fixes an issue where ipxe would take a very long time downloading kernels and initrd's
• all logging goes through Torquebox's logging subsystem now. See the logging docs for details
• upgrade to Torquebox 3.0.1 and jRuby 1.7.8
• lots of bug fixes and minor improvements

0.10.0 - 2013-09-18

First release of the rewrite. See github for details about the new code base and for installation instructions.