What's New with Warewulf

going to be winning very exciting very awesome we're going to announce it live we're going to get a hold of you any which way that we possibly can so make sure that you like and subscribe um uh to our Channel and let me see I'm almost I almost pressed the okay stop sharing I almost left here so Jonathan it would just have been you hang I'm gonna just put this out here real quick maybe this maybe the uh the giveaway backpack needs to come with uh some ciq or signatures on it as well I like your Stu going to call people out right here I

think that backpack needs some signatures on it before it goes out okay maybe we'll ask the person who they want because if I go signing it that might be awesome it might not be awesome you're a celebrity you're on the ciq webinar every there you go thank you very much love it love it okay so Jonathan let's um would you mind just giving like a little bit of like a framework of what werewolf is and a little bit of the difference of like werewolf 3 to werewolf version 4 even though I know we really want to talk about 4.5 but it comes up a lot

and I think it would be helpful yeah yeah so werewolf is a cluster provisioning H management system so it's not kind of a full do everything for you cluster management system like some other might be but it it really is focused just on the process of I have some servers they're probably all the same uh and I want to take them from they're just metal in the rack I want to be able to turn them on and use them for something and uh it comes with some batteries included for that to help you get uh we have some node images that are available on the

in the community to help you get let's say rocky Linux provisioned on all of them and then to configure them to do different things depending what you add to that image or the configuration that you push out in the werewolf overlay system um it's difficult for me to compare to werewolf 3 mostly because I've never used werewolf 3 day-to-day I've really been a part of the werewolf 4 system one of the big things that people notice um is is that werewolf 4 is really focused on this stateless provisioning uh Paradigm where you turn your Hardware on and every time you turn it on you get

the same configuration out of it you know unless you've changed something on the server side but uh if you restart your server you get the same thing back um there are some questions about what that means for the future of being able to use the diss uh on the the system and we can talk about that a little bit when we start getting into development that's happened in 450 um but for the most part werewolf is focused on that that experience you turn the Noe on you know it's going to behave the same way as the last time you turned it on uh from kind

of a systems perspective when I have in a past life evaluated whether we were going to deploy werewolf 3 at the time um one of the things we didn't like about it was how opaque some of the configuration in it was um my understanding I wasn't the one doing the eval but my understanding was a lot of werewolves uh werewolf 3's configuration existed in a database uh that you could have had to manage in order to to get information in and out of it including I think all of the overlay files that you wanted all the configuration files that you wanted to push out to

nodes existed in a database and then the node images that you were sending out were kind of big stateful directories that you had to initialize by hand and you would log into them and make changes you can do that kind of thing with werewolf 4 as well but werewolf 4 kind of takes that stateless Paradigm of of being able to declaratively say I will turn my note on and get this config all the way back to how you configure werewolf itself all of the configuration for werewolf is uh just normal files on your file system there are a pair of yaml documents that configure werewolf

itself the overlay files are just files on your file system that you we can provide some convenience commands to manage but you can always also just go see them on the file system and put files in there that will get pushed out to nodes uh or edit them directly there's some templating in there as well and we can show off some of that but that's to me the value of werewolf 4 it's it tries to be as thin a layer as possible between you and getting something useful pushed out to your your nodes and and making them do the work that you want without having

to have as many opinions about how that system how that service should be configured uh once it's in production in your environment awesome thank you for that I'm going to direct people to this webinar uh when they ask me the difference between three and four why four and what is there such a difference so thank you I appreciate that a lot um I know that you know maybe this is the right time maybe it isn't but if people are are interested in kind of werewolf and and what's going on with it I know that the community has actually changed places changed locations and that was

actually a big and awesome move and and also a um a testimony to the growth of the community and so where can we actually find that yeah great and I I hope people can bear with me for a moment because I I don't just want to talk about it I want to show where these things are so that people have a point of reference um but I've got like a mess of Windows here on my desktop so I'm going to start trying to share things the first thing uh is let's see let's get this first one up oh I can share a whole window instead

of just a chrome tag I love this I love it when you share things I love demos I like to actually see it this is magical thank you oh man it's I know that's what that's what I always got okay it's this one it's this one right here I think okay we start here uh so the first thing great uh is that so werewolf was at one point werewolf 4 anyway was being managed as part of kind of a larger umbrella organization uh hpcg or HPC Next Generation Um that organization's purpose has kind of uh has been fulfilled frankly um and werewolf was kind of

the only thing left in it so we've done some work to try and Rebrand werewolves organization around itself and so uh if you're looking for werewolf uh we'll we're looking at kind of the git repo here um the source code is now in a werewolf git organization rather than having to find it in an hpcg and so here you can find the code but you can also find releases and we'll talk about that in a bit this is also where you can go to uh file issues and so if you are using werewolf and you've noticed a problem or you have something you wish it

would do uh put that in here and if you're interested in what's going on what's coming up in the future of werewolf we've got some milestones in here with dates our goal is to try and uh get two Al major releases out a year uh we're hoping to schedule those in time for ISC in the spring and then uh SC in the fall and so the 450 and and we're doing that kind of in lock step or or lock step is too strong in collaboration with the open HPC community in an attempt to try and get these releases into their release schedule which is also

targeted at matching uh those those large conferences where a specific audience would be interested in a tool like this so we have 450 out uh but we're already working as you can tell on 451 which has some like smaller non-breaking enhancements that we wanted to get in but didn't quite make it in 450 and then bugs that we've noticed or or that have been reported uh since the release which you know was only Sunday but we've had a few um so that the first thing uh so yeah if you're looking for werewolf itself or code uh come here the second thing and I I wish

I wasn't uh uh I wish I wasn't jumping between Windows quite as much but this will the next few after this should be all back in that same window so we'll start here um we have a new uh slack presence as well and so here we go yeah so if you aren't already uh part of the werewolf slack team is this sharing it should be sharing um I don't see it yet but I'm sure that they are on it and I'm sure that they'll um put we have little magic fingers behind the scenes that they'll add the link as well into um into the chat

it's not there yet okay yeah we're working on it so I'll talk a little bit so yeah um oh can't can't access my screen fascinating okay I'll just talk about this one for now apparently stream streamyard is having trouble sharing slack which is probably a good thing probably so um so yeah we we have a new werewolf slack it is at werewolf.com but you can get a um I tell you what I'll just go back to sharing that browser window because I can show where you can get access to it there um oh good so from the get repository you can access the not from

the get repository but from the the website so okay uh um yeah okay so if you go to werewolf.com community and this is now just werewolfs slack.com frankly it was a a pretty encouraging thing that when you know we collected some contacts from the original slack that was with hpcg and just sent hey we're moving over to this new uh werewolf slack come join us if you're interested like the next day we had 100 people in there which was was pretty encouraging and it it's pretty active i' I've been really excited by not just the people using it but the people interested in helping to

develop or work on documentation has been a big thing for us and then there's like little subgroups that have splintered off there's a whole channel for people that are trying to get werewolf running on Raspberry pies and and single board computers like that and there's a channel in there for people that are still using and maintaining in a certain sense uh the the version three of werewolf so uh you know it's been great to see the community kind of come together and consolidate into that that one place let's see what else okay so another thing that has happened since the last release is we've really

formalized our our steering committee process so uh we were already having meetings and taking some notes uh but we now this is to release management we have a a steering committee process we meet twice a month and talk about development and what's happening uh what's coming into the project how what people have discovered using it so these notes are public but I'm not now I'm wondering where they're posted uh if you join the meeting you'll definitely have access to them and if you'd like to join that meeting and listen in and hear what's going on uh it's it's certainly open right now um let me

know in uh in werewolf you or in the werewolf slack you can reach out to me or or ask in the general Channel or something like that we'd we'd love to see you and and hear from you and what you're using werewolf for and how your experience has been and then one more thing on the Community Front which is a little bit more towards the release management side of this uh we have this nightly release now so this is a really easy way for people who want to try out where we uh like the the latest features to haven't made it into a normal release

yet for them to install one of these packages rather than have to build it from Source because if you if you build Werewolf a lot it's not that big of a deal but if you've never built it before it can be kind of frustrating uh so these packages exist for Enterprise Linux 7 so if you're running it on an old sentos environment you can do that uh Enterprise Linux 8 or9 if you're on Rocky 8 or9 or an equivalent and then uh sus leap um 15.5 I think is what I'm seeing there so all that's there and uh one thing that I want to call

out for viewers because of an eccentricity of the way um GitHub releases work uh this release is showing up maybe it's not because of how wide this is but uh the release shows up with a different date than it actually has been so people are often concerned that this releas is out of date or it's not being updated the packages in it do get updated so we can see this one here just was updated last night as you would expect um but if we're out here on uh oh that's not where I want to be I want to go here if we're just looking at

releases and then look for nightly we need to find a way to pin this up higher so people see it but if you look here this date is when we first started doing night really releases and we we haven't found a way to update this yet without destroying and recreating the release every night which we're we're trying to avoid but uh that's where that is so yeah that's a super fun little added I don't know it's not a feature but a capability it's awesome I included it in the release notes for 450 because it is a new thing since the last release but yeah it's

it's on the community side we're generating this nightly release now which is kind of cool really cool um so a couple more things that are worth calling out before we start talking about 450 specifically um as I mentioned documentation has been a bit of a gap for us and I think that's in this tag yeah so uh one of the things to call out is that we are finally generating two different streams of documentation we have whatever's in main right now but then separately we're tracking documentation for for 45x uh and so that will be kept up to date as we're developing things that will

get pushed out to 451 452 that kind of thing uh but then if there's new functionality that won't be released as a 45 uh will put that in Main and so people can continue to uh you know look at either of these depending on whether really you're using a nightly or using a released version and then we'll plan to keep 45x published when we get to 466 and expect to have more uh lines of documentation up here as we go on and then one other documentation thing I wanted to highlight so the the quick guide here has been a bit of a pain point because

it hadn't been updated in a while the previous version of this was based on the expectation that you would be building werewolf from Source uh but now that we're publishing packages uh I at least uh who who updated this uh think that it makes a lot more sense for most people in a quick start context to be installing from the packages that we're providing so this guide has been updated to uh expect that hopefully this is showing yeah 450 it was earlier the release candidate uh so you can use this guide to install werewolf get started really quickly I did find something that I want

to change here although I think with this guide it it uh it works as expected um and I was really pleased when updating this documentation that I was able to just follow the instructions and I had a working werewolf on the outside and so hopefully you can follow this guide and have the same experience it is always nice when things work as they say they will so yes thank you for all that I've forgotten one more thing before we start talking about 450 specifically and this this is again getting a little bit more towards that um another big change uh that has happened since the

last release and one of the reasons that there's been such a delay uh is that we have uh We've really focused on testing in this release and so the these are issues that are still open and pending right now uh but uh we have a fully automated test Suite in place now finally um that we've a lot of work has gone into we certainly don't have 100% coverage of the code or anything like that but now every time A Change Is made any pull request that comes in we have a full test Suite that's run against three different versions of goang we're also making checks

for code formatting and linting um to make sure that when things are changed things that worked before continue to work and if a bug is found we test for that bug which you know seems like it should just be assumed but we're you know we're uh formalizing this process all the time and so yeah if if you're interested in software reliability or software testing that is also a great place to get involved is to to help with the test Suite because there's a lot of work done but there's work to do also absolutely yeah thank you again for all the work that you do on

this and everybody else in the community so we saw that that little list of those of you that had attended the previous meeting uh when you were sharing the notes from the meeting and so oh yes yes it's it's it's not just ciq obviously ciq is here we provide you know support and um you know extra features and help and implementation and all of that kind of stuff um but it's it's good to see the collaboration going on yeah for sure so so what do you think should we go into a demo I guess one thing that we we should say is if you're watching

and you have a question about werewolf or have had an experience uh I'd hope that you uh will put your comments into the chat and we'd love to answer questions and and highlight some of that but I've got a few things that I can show off in werewolf 4 five if we're ready for that but youut let me know what should we do now there's no better time than now I want I want to see it show me show me it all right uh and this definitely won't be everything um I think well I think I've I've gotten I've moved away from it but yeah

if if you want to see a pretty complete list of what's in this release the release notes are pretty pretty uh I won't quite say exhaustive but there's a lot of stuff in there and so there's a lot of detail about what's going on but we'll switch over to a demo environment and show off a couple of them that I'm happy about so are you going to get into a little bit what to do like is a big difference if you're running 44 right now versus and like what it's going to take to kind of do the update to four five or if you you're

just kind of assuming that they're coming in fresh that is a great question I didn't plan to talk about that but I really should have so um let me get this this share shared so they can uh get that pulled up and then I'll start I mean it's okay either way but maybe let's just be clear and then especially I think we covered this like if you're coming from three just yeah if you're coming from three it's best not to think of it as there being an upgrade path that's more like our strong recommendation would be oh no can't access this screen either um my

recommendation there would be to set up a new server uh and migrate things to it rather than to try to upgrade from one to the other uh I think I'm going to need to share my whole screen so let me move some windows around yes and uh so that we're only sharing what needs to be shared want me to sing a little bit Yeah here it's coming okay sorry about that that's um is that going to work oh my and now we've got this whole thing going yeah so we'll we'll at least let's man I want to be able to see what's going on but

I'm not gonna be able to okay um so to the question of of MiG grading for the most part uh upgrading from 44 or 441 to 45 should be relatively straightforward if you've customized the base overlays so werewolf uses a set of overlays um they're they're usually in VAR lib werewolf overlays uh if you've modified let's say the host overlay or the generic overlay or the WW init overlay uh then that um might that those changes will be overwritten uh when you upgrade and we're trying to improve for for the future the separation between these system overlays and then custom overlays you might provide like

like these that I've added um so that that's something to be aware of the other thing to be aware of is um and we'll show off a config or a command here real quick uh as part of it if you uh werewolf cares which network interface is primary because that is the one that it's going to be um that's the one that it's going to be provisioning over and in the past the way that worked is you had your list of network devices and then um there was is this one primary primary true or false or yes or no or something like that that's not

how it works anymore now you specify uh your primary interface and it looks like I actually don't have either of these set as primary but if you're specifying a primary interface separate than what it would pick on its own um that's on the Node level so let's let's actually change that let's say node well I can edit here uh so you would say primary network default and and so now hopefully yeah primary net Dev is default um so that that's the biggest difference but my understanding I haven't tested this myself but my understanding is if you're still specifying it the old way werewolf will still

uh ingest that and and respect it it'll still use that value but if it writes out what the default is um this is how you do it now otherwise for the most part A lot of it is bug fixes and new features that shouldn't interfere with your existing environment but we'd still recommend backing up your werewolf.com and nodes. comp and probably your overlay uh directory uh in case you need to roll back to a previous version or or reach out for help and and that way you'll make sure you don't lose anything um so give me one moment I man I wasn't anticipating sharing my

whole screen but uh now now I don't have my notes so let me pull up my notes in a different place and that way I will know what I wanted to show off um yeah maybe we can take that screen down so I mean we don't have anything weird in our little internal chat but maybe we don't need our stream oh yeah this is here too I apologize oh my I'm just gonna do this um this is what happens the exact exactly I I totally feel your pain man is exactly why I was like I don't think I want to share because you never know

um okay here are my notes uh excellent um so yeah uh one of the thing there there are normal features uh that are added in werewolf 4 uh or Sorry 4 five but there's a few uh preview things that we've added that uh some members of the werewolf development community pretty excited about so uh werewolf uses other systems as as subsystems within itself so ultimately werewolf is is using DHCP to configure nodes over the network and then it uses pixie to boot or a program called I pixie to provide a configuration and transmit a kernel and a node image to it and then uh we

use tftp to do that actual file transfer and historically those have all been separate components um but uh werewolf 45 provides the optional ability uh to uh use a a single program called DNS mask to take over the DHCP and the tftp configuration so that would happen in ETC werewolf werewolf.com and it's actually pretty simple uh we have DNS mask here and DNS mask here and we're automatically generating a DNS mask configuration and uh people that are interested and might want to use DNS mask for configuring these Services instead of dhcpd or tftpd um Can can use this and it just worked I was actually

really happy about how well it worked in uh in preparing for this and so I've got a node set aside uh that's booted up this way the other thing that is a preview feature uh is a little bit of storage configuration so this is still also like the others uh a bit of a preview and I was having a little bit of trouble with it just minutes before this this demo as it always is so I think I'll leave the node up to start and then um uh uh and then maybe we'll reboot it to see it provision at the very end but uh you

can specify um partitions that you want to provision as part of bringing the note up what file system you want them to be uh and where they should be mounted and the ultimate goal of this is to be able to provision file systems with hopefully uh in a future release the ability to provision the node image onto the disk um without having to consume memory uh with that so we still want the provisioning to be stateless uh but maybe we'll be able to write that image to disk rather than to memory to be able to use the memory for computation instead so when you say

maybe that's yes you can if you want to uh that's we do not yet have the capability for it but we're working towards that being our goal um but that that that is intended for a future release but we're still working out what it's actually going to look like so if that's something that interests you it's a good opportunity to come and join slack and and have a voice in that conversation for for how um dis full provisioning might work in a future release of werewolf um so I'm I'm showing off one of the more official new features of werewolf here um I think node

edit was present before uh even in 44 um but it's been cleaned up a lot and frankly I've been using it to do my werewolf configuration in preparation for this demo more than just running commands so if I I'll say again if I edit a node um and you can edit a profile as well um yeah uh not only are the fe uh the attributes of that node present but then there are comments at the top that show you all of the available configuration options and how they should be formatted uh in a node so earlier uh if you saw I was able to find

um I was able to find the primary Network declaration here and then just copy it down into my node fill it out and save it and that became active configuration in my node and I can do that to change anything about my node here quit out and if I have made a change it will ask me if I want to apply it to the node and and we say yes and it's reined so that makes discovery of options and how they're formatted really simple um and lets you see kind of the whole nodes configuration the other way to do that is with this node list

command this is what we've done all the time uh but you know this is readon so now you can do something like that uh but make changes directly to the node um another thing that's been requested a fair bit is the ability to copy a container so if I look at uh so containers are are how werewolf refers to uh the node images that you ingest into it and that you can uh provision out to nodes um one of the things we wanted to be able to support is let's say I have this production image I want to make changes to it and then boot

some nodes with that changed version before I roll it out into uh production for the rest of the cluster and you could do that before but you had to kind of do it in the background and and just copy files around now we can say well it's probably my have to spell it correctly and I'll do this 89 one uh I know I'll do the 93 because it's smaller uh copy Rocky 93 to 93 test and the end result of this will be that I have a a rocky 93 test container that starts uh from exactly where Rocky 93 was and then I can shell

into that make changes Point some nodes at it to boot it make sure it works before I um before I boot it on the rest of the cluster I'm probably going to cancel this out one of the things about my test environment here is it's it's pretty slow and especially the discs are pretty slow uh so rather than wait for this yeah I think I'm going to cancel do you like questions kind of like as we go or you want to wait until you're like done with your flow I say if if there's questions let's take them I'm going to stop sharing for now and

see if maybe uh I can get a where where where are you here you are uh and see if maybe I can get the share going just as this window again uh but yeah if there are questions let's take them yeah so thanks Nano um so they're saying what are your plans for offering a ciq werewolf version 4.5.1 aper container so there there's some work happening on the community side for for building and supporting a containerized version of werewolf itself where you could run werewolf as a container right now uh I haven't seen any movement towards doing that with aper um um but there's not

as I think about it right here there's not too much of a reason why you couldn't the the biggest issue is that werewolf is one component in a set of services so it wants to configure DHCP for you it wants to configure tftp for you um so running all of those inside of one container isn't what one would normally do normally you'd have a container for each of those services and that's where somewhere in my notes just from yesterday I wrote down hey it would be great great if we could run werewolf as a kubernetes appliance and have all of these Services running as microservices

but that's not something that's really planned out it's more just uh an idea that I had okay so and then there's a followup to the question is there an ha feature available in werewolf yes so um yeah so not as a first classg goinging concern uh there are ways to have something approximating ha so much of werewolf itself is stateless and so if you can replicate the the configuration between two environments and that's relatively simple to do um then you can have multiple werewolf servers and then just whichever one gets the request will feed the node image out to to the node that's asking for

a configuration and that's fine um there are there are other ways to kind of Shard it out and have different part different servers responsible for different parts of the cluster which isn't really ha that's more of a load balancing thing um but we at least need to and this comes back to the issue of documentation we at least need to uh clean up our story around that and show people what we mean when we say hey here's the strategy for running multiple werewolf servers and and letting them not quite fail over to each other but both be active at the same time in the same

network and that way if one of them goes down the other one will just continue to work but something to keep in mind with werewolf is it's not really a dependent part of the cluster being up and running it's really only needed when nodes are starting up so if your cluster is up and working and the Werewolf server goes down the cluster stays up uh you only have a problem if a node another node shuts down and you need to bring it up up then that node can't come up because its configuration is behind werewolf which is down at that time you know in this

scenario um so in general it's not as big of a problem as uh as it might seem at first uh but we definitely need to get it documented a bit better than it is I I have a question actually it's just something that's been on my mind um you know how like with Rocky we can see how many people have pulled from the RF like like how many people are are pulling and running and deploying and we can't really tell any more than that other than theyve grabbed it to use it is there something like that with werewolf like do we have an idea of

how many people are using it so you know that I so I don't know right now I will say that if such a thing exists I would expect that to come from GitHub analytics but I haven't looked into it at all um that's a great question I I we should do that um most of the indication we have for that is is participation in the slack and when people show up and have questions there and we see the traffic of people talking about it and asking questions about it but nothing at the level of of downloading it and using it I expect the open HPC

Community would have some of that information as well but only for people that are getting it out of open HPC instead of getting it from from the community directly from from werewolf directly yeah great okay just as we got one more question uh MB okay is there an option to set dir permissions as part of the disk partitioning so I don't think that the the facility that we're partitioning the discs with has that capability on its own but what we would do is just have an overlay for the partition for for the mount point so you'd have uh one step that Provisions the disc and

and sets the mount and then another step that configures the permissions on it uh later so that that should totally be acceptable and I might even be wrong it might be that there's a facility to do that during disproving but I don't think so I didn't see it when I was setting it up uh myself earlier so how's it going on your end getting the um command line back up to share yeah so it I'm I'm gonna have to just go back to sharing the screen it's not letting me do a window so yeah if we've got if we've done those questions I've got a

few more demo things to do but I'll start by minimizing this and going blind again and then uh oh I have to share first uh present share screen and you just tell me when we're back up because I can't see yeah I can see it yeah it looks great okay great um so another thing well first of all uh you know we talk about these overlays and uh and explain kind of everything that's in there um but for people that aren't in it every day and haven't used it a lot it can still feel a little bit opaque and so uh one of the things

that I hadn't even used until preparing for this um but that uh a member of the community I think I think Christian from sus put this out um is improved tab completion for the overlay stuff so if we say like WWL overlay uh list we can see like overlays here and then if we look at uh might as say you know we can see all of these files but again this is still pretty it's all going to be readon but there there's not a lot you can do with it but if I say overlay show and we've had this command for a while to be

able to show a specific overlay file um I can now tab complete here and see the overlays that are available so I can look at this uh W overlay and then tab complete again to see files that are in it and so one that I did earlier in prep was to look at the Etsy CIS config Network interf or network scripts if config and this is so much easier than even what I was doing before knowing where all the overlay files are I can just look directly at this file that's in this overlay and this is the template that's there now this is a little

bit complex and you know you can try to imagine your nodes configuration and how it will apply to this template but something else and we've had this feature for a little bit but actually I don't remember if this is yeah I think we had this in 44 um but we've added this render capability and so you can say render uh ww node one is the node that I have in this environment and we can see what this file looks like uh if rendered on that node and that coupled with the ability to tab complete through an overlay makes managing and seeing what your overlays are

going to do much more straightforward so we're you know I'm excited uh to get that into people's hands and we we need to document this capability more than it is right now because I think this is going to help a lot of people out that are developing custom overlays or or modifying these buil-in overlays uh get my notes back up here uh so uh and another thing that some of our our uh our power users uh have been asking for for a while so if we look at uh our node configuration again this is this is my node ww node one uh it has multiple

profiles and multiple profiles is something that we have supported for a while uh and in general it's just the the last profile that you specify is where configuration comes from so if profile two uh is what set primary network if if default profile one and profile two all tell it what its primary Network should be um profile 2 is the one that wins it's its value is used uh but that was true for overlays as as well so if all three of these set overlays only the overlays that were set in profile 2 uh would get used which is not really what people expected they

wanted to be able to have some overlays in the default profile and then add overlays from this profile and add them from this profile so that will that's a big change in werewolf uh 450 and you asked earlier about people that are moving from one environment to another most people aren't doing multiple profiles uh but if you are uh this is a a relatively large Behavior change so if we look at node list we can now see that I have runtime overlay uh is getting generic overlay one and overlay two and these are obviously contrived examples I have overlay one coming from profile one and

overlay two coming from profile two and the generics coming from default but I'm able to just mix these three profiles together and get all of the overlays from them without having to specify the full list either on the Node or on a specific profile um so that will make it much easier to Define groupings of behavior for different types of nodes and then mix them together at the end rather than having to uh just always have the full set of what a node should be able to do in a single profile um and then one last thing to show off in here uh so this

is something that we didn't even consider was a problem before um but DNS configuration used to happen as kind of an accident for how we were uh how we were importing containers into werewolf when we did that we were copying the DNS configuration from the host the werewolf server into the Container uh just so that you had it when you were configuring that container but we have a a new way of doing that which meant that the provisioned node no longer had DNS configuration so we've added the ability through the tags functionality so uh werewolf nodes can have tags either per network interface or I

don't have any uh set here but you can set them on the Node you can also set them on an ipmi uh interface but I don't even have one of those here um but if we set dns1 and dns2 and it works for any number of DNS entries actually um you can specify DNS configuration here and then that if I go over to my node gets populated at uh Etc resolve.

comp and then also uh in we can see I configured this on the default Network device it configures it in the interface configuration file for that interface so uh this is the new Now official way to configure DNS for your infrastructure you can do it other ways as well uh but this is a a pretty handy little addition uh to werewolf for doing that I think the last thing that I'd like to try to do uh if I can uh is uh demonstrate let's see if I can share this window and get a provision going to just show one of them running um let's see

if it lets me share this window hey it worked great they work yay so this is a node that's already working but I'm going to reset it here yeah making sure I'm resetting the right node so one thing I didn't talk about I talked about DNS mask uh and I talked about its ignition is the system that is doing the dis configuration but I also mentioned ipixie and ipixie is the system that uh that actually boots your node and and starts Linux um in traditionally in werewolf but we've run into some limitations with ipixie and so as a preview here we've introduced the ability to

boot a node with grub and Grub is the default Bootloader for most Linux environments if you're just installing Linux on your on your system directly you're you're likely using grub to start it uh it's the grand unified bootloader if I recall correctly um and one of the things we lose is better or pixie provides better status indication it gave us a percentage of how far along the node was in booting um but one of the things we gain with grub is the ability to secure boot your node so uh we when you build a container we're actually pulling the grub binary and shim out of

that container to use to boot the node so the end result is if you need secure a boot in a werewolf environment you can have the entire system secured exactly as it would if you were were just installing Linux on your node and know that everything that's running is signed and verified by your distribution um and we're hoping that grub will also help us with some limitations that we've encountered in werewolf for uh node image sizes where uh once werewolf containers once the node images get to a certain size we've been having trouble with ipixie being able to provision them so far that seems to

be going well um but use of grub here is definitely still in a a preview State um so it takes a little while and like I mentioned uh I don't have as much progress indication as I would like here but it should uh go on to the next step where it's actually booting Linux in not too long but uh yeah here we go we have our little penguins up here uh and you know it's passed off to Linux now and it's booting is normal the reason I wanted to save this to the very end is that I was having some trouble with the or it

appeared like I was having some trouble uh remounting the storage from a previous provision so we see that here um well it disappeared there but it's still trying to mount um oh now I understand yeah this is the problem with with live demos this is not actually a problem with the storage this is uh it having been told now to mount home and shared off of uh NFS coming from the head node which it's not configured to provide so that's my fault this is actually working as intended except for I made a mistake here so this will eventually give up and the node will be

provisioned correctly but that's where we are today that's what I've prepared to show off um but if we have any more questions happy to take those uh but yeah yes I love questions okay so we'll give you guys at one minute here um to ask any other questions that you have of Jonathan at this moment I had a little bit of a question just because I know that this comes up and um C can you just like give a a like a a little tidbit of like what an overlay is and like how it's kind of special to werewolf yeah so the the the node

image is you can it's just a directory or like a folder or whatever it's a it's a copy of what would otherwise just be on the computer's disc right what what we're going to put out into memory that's what is everything on the Node that we're telling it to boot uh but if you just have that then uh great it it gave up trying to do what it wasn't able to do and it is booted successfully so I will uh it's my fault for telling it to do something that it couldn't do I'll stop that for now uh so yeah if all you have is

the image then when you provision that out to the nodes they're all exactly the same except for they're not they they're not all exactly the same because they each need to have a name that's different and they each need to have um like a network address that's different different so that you can get to each of them uh so that's the the real you must have something that lets you configure each node independently from whatever's in the image there are various ways to do that um like in the cloud there's a system called cloud in it uh that is is used to apply configuration to

your node based on how it's configured in that cloud system um I'm actually interested in and and investigating what it would look like to support cloud in it uh as a a way to configure werewolf nodes as well uh but another thing is how to provision its dis and so that's what we're using ignition for um but overlay is let you place configuration files on the Node that aren't coming from the the the image itself that aren't coming from that container and sometimes that's just for a separation of concerns because maybe this group of nodes will have this configuration and this group of nodes will

have another one the node images are pretty big and they're harder to manage so maybe I don't want to have a whole separate image for those two different groups of nodes I can just say use the same image use the same Rocky Linux image and then also these files on these nodes and also these files on these nodes that's what an overlays for but then we also support templates in the overlays that let you say have it be this file but then a variable here put the node's name or put the node's address or that kind of thing uh and that's where the templated overlays

come in and those are built for each node individually so that lets each node have its own configuration uh unique in the cluster um so that it when it comes up it's configured properly it knows its name it knows what address it should respond on uh and that permeates through the configuration if you have an application it probably needs or it there are many instances where that application will need to know what its address is or uh what the name of the note is it's running on is um and sometimes what other nodes exist in the cluster so the overlay system doesn't just know about

itself but it knows about all of the nodes in the cluster so you can do complex things like build a config file that tells the node how to reach other nodes in the cluster based on their configuration as well wow so it sounds like gives it a lot of like depth and flexibility yeah it's where all of the configuration flexibility and werewolf comes in and so one of the things that we're offering at ciq in addition to just like you are running werewolf we will support you running werewolf um we're also building node images for people uh if they need configuration or customization in a

node image that they're unable to figure out on their own we can do that we can provide it to you as source and as a place to pull that image from um and then ingest it directly into werewolf from a registry um but we're also providing Uh custom overlays and in in my mind those pair really well so if you have a if you need a custom node image you probably need some custom overlays to configure the software that's in that node image so you can pull that image into werewolf install this custom overlay and then use some tags or metadata on your node to

configure how you want that application in that image to behave awesome well sold excellent excellent there it is I'll I'll have I'll have Rose contact you about uh contract and she will she will so um yes everybody out there so obviously thank you Jonathan thank you to the werewolf Team all the work that you guys have done I mean that was really incredible I think we spent like 20 minutes just talking about the transition and the work that has gone on behind the scenes that is supporting the community at large not even just about the new features in 4.5 um point0 so yeah it's it's

an exciting time to be a part of the project and I I hope if you're interested that you'll join us on uh on slack and we'll especially if you're looking for somewhere to contribute we'll we'll get you slotted in we'll find something for you to do for sure we definitely have something for you to do and um if you're looking for the extra features that Jonathan was talking about and the support where you actually have somebody to call and it's not just inside of the the you know slack Community although they are amazing um ciq is more than happy to chat with you so yeah reach out to us cq.

comom um you can fill out any any anything that you fill out there it'll come to us and we'll get you squared away so absolutely thank you so much so make sure that you guys like subscribe win that car heart backpack on the thousandth 10,000th subscriber we're almost there you guys all right well have a wonderful wonderful day again thank you so much and we'll see you next week same time same place see you later Ros [Music]