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Open Hour Agendas and Notes: 2020 12

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Derek Ardolf edited this page Dec 17, 2020 · 5 revisions

2020-DEC-17 Open Hour Agenda

  • General updates
  • Docs Clinic Today
  • Existing SEPs
  • Discussion and Q&A

2020-DEC-17 Meeting Notes

This is the last Open Hour of the year! We get back to it on January 7th, 2021!

General Updates

  • Bugfix releases yesterday!
    • 3001.4
    • 3000.6
    • 2019.2.8

    Notice that there isn't a new 3002.x release. This is because the fix is already included in 3002.2!

  • Salt Project branding: Posted in community slack, would love feedback!
  • Remaining videos from SaltConf20 are getting posted to YouTube

Docs Clinic Today

Streaming on Twitch: twitch.tv/saltstackinc

FOSDEM 2021 Online: Call For Participation

There is a Call For Participation (CFP) for the Infrastructure Management DevRoom, with a deadline of December 31st, 2020. We highly encourage people of the Salt community to apply.

Snippet from the site:

The devroom will normally run on Saturday 6 February 2021.

The Infra Management Devroom is a devroom for developers, system engineers, SRE, system administrators and all practitioners of Infrastructure as Code or Infrastructure Management.

We are looking for any topic relating to Infrastructure, including but not limited to Configuration Management, Infrastructure Orchestration, Infrastructure Management, Infrastructure Automation, and Infrastructure Monitoring.

Existing SEPs

All PRs in SEPs repo here: Salt Enhancement Proposals

Community Feedback/Thoughts on SEPs

SEP 26: Pkg Salt with Tiamat

Question: What is the purpose/mission of the Community Advisory Board?

The purpose/mission of the Community Advisory Board is to give a more formalized voice to the community through regular and revolving representation that the core team can sync with on issues and developments within the community. This will not minimize the voice of those in the community who are not on the board. The board members will be tasked with staying abreast of issues that arise within community slack and other places to filter and highlight those concerns. The responsibilities and purpose will evolve and adjust over time.

For the related SEP discussion: SEP 27 - Create Community Advisory Board

Discussion and Q&A

Work on pepper

Randy Thompson is working on a fork, upgrading pepper to Python 3.6+

salt-api rewrite in FastAPI

Randy Thompson is working on a FastAPI implementation/rewrite!

Question: Is there a better alternative to heavy pillar usage for minion configurations?

Are there any plans to make a minion-based configuration system available that can take the load off master-side pillar? The difficulty I keep seeing being talked about is people overusing pillar because there's no simple alternative.

The huge amount of non-secret data that people put into pillar, because it's easy to target. But there's no alternative that can match and merge on the minion. We have to write complex map.jinja for every different use case.

Grains come from the minion, this is config from the master.

Why not give the minion their own pillar_top.sls for example, that simply reads from the fileserver and transparently does it all.

So we'd still need to have map.jinja to merge secrets and non-secrets?

  • @baby-gnu from the Formulas Working Group has been working on something similar to this and has a prototype in the openssh-formula. See the documentation for map.jinja for merging secrets (from pillars) with non-secrets (from the filesystem):
  • SDB should also be looked at as another way of storing and retrieving data.
    • Lookups in sdb should be faster than reading from pillars directly anyway since it's just a datastore.
    • Maybe an expansion of SDB's capabilities is needed if it currently doesn't support the use case here? An SDB module which reads from a pillar-esque top file could be helpful.

This may require a new SEP, or and expansion/extension of the documentation if existing features may support what's needed.

2020-DEC-10 Open Hour Agenda

2020-DEC-10 Open Hour Meeting Notes

General Updates

Bugfix Release: Dec 16th, Wednesday

Community Calendar

  • Google Calendar still exists and has the same information with new meeting IDs Google Calendar until the end of the year
  • New Outlook Calendar links HTML or ICS

How-to use salt to update salt minions salt version

  • Docs: How-to: use salt to update minions to new salt version https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/faq.html#what-is-the- best-way-to-restart-a-salt-minion-daemon-using-salt-after-upgrade From Wayne quick transcription on IRC live:
  • gareth> not sure about packages, but I think an upgrade on a systemd platform will restart salt >you can't just do a salt \* service.restart, because it drops the return message >a salt runner can be helpful
  • Erik> when we do config updates we use a cmd.run with bg=True to do a salt-call service restart
  • gareth> salt-call with start its own minion
  • erik> yeah, it's not in its own cgroup
  • Andrew> Just have a 3000.2 memory leak question (3002?)

  • what is the style of memory leak I should look for? (assorted memory leak discussion) nothing new

The Documentation Group, and Docs Clinics

Existing SEPs

All PRs in the SEPs repo represent open discussions on Salt Enhancement Proposals.

  • Several current SEPs
  • We want to hear from you!
  • We will continue to work through these and looking at the process
  • Community Advisory Board in the new year

Discussion Q&A

From Wayne live transcript in IRC:

  • ??> when will the new community site appear?
  • sage> not sure, but we should know about it in January, I'm pushing for the community site to be release in January
  • sage> had an internal meeting with the VMWare open source group(s) and there's some really good resources and support there
  • Ken> Do we know what's happening with CentOS8?
  • Tom> we'll probably still be supporting CentOS (stream) > there's a "rocky" linux, that might maintain the CentOS-style > a lot of people are invested in making a stable CentOS release, so we'll have to see what comes out of this (not unexpected) disruption
  • sage> in the past we've had roadmaps where we show a timeline for support, and even a future roadmap for support > right now it's just an idea, but this could be useful for this type of circumstance
  • Erik> Are we using Python 3.9 yet?
  • Wayne> I know it's in our Nox config
  • Bryce> Yeah, Fedora is already on 3.9, so that's out there
  • Erik> Working on a PR for some yum bit rot. Newer distros name some of these plugins differently
  • Sage> I was looking through the backlog and noticed that there was something still assigned to Erik - not sure if you're actually working on it
  • sage> we'll be off for a couple of weeks at the holidays

2020-DEC-03 Open Hour Agenda

2020-DEC-03 Open Hour Meeting Notes

General Updates

Bugfix Release: Dec 16th, Wednesday

Community calendar

  • Google Calendar still exists and has the same information with new meeting IDs Google Calendar until the end of the year

  • New Outlook Calendar links HTML or ICS

  • Community Website has wrong links this week, and Sage will follow up to be sure it is corrected as of today (DEC-03) had old Zoom links.

Do you want to get more involved in salt and the SaltStack community? Get involved:

The Documentation Group, and Docs Clinics

Existing SEPs

All PRs in the SEPs repo represent open discussions on Salt Enhancement Proposals.

  • Several current SEPs
  • We want to hear from you!
  • We will continue to work through these and looking at the process
  • Community Advisory Board in the new year
  • Rough consensus overall in the SEPs, we have to make compromises, not to be perfect, but to hear from the community and give the community a voice
  • Suggested: Polling within the SEPs process, discussions don't reach an obvious conclusion
    • Using the GitHub Pull Request approval process as a vote or poll, can put in more details with approval or not
    • Constructively disagree may not work exactly, we can take a look at that piece of the process and solidify
    • RSS Feed on the PRs may be available in GitHub or on the Community Website
  • Soliciting feedback through all the communication platforms
  • Community.SaltStack.com - one source of truth,
    • Currently SEPs are not listed suggested to add at least a link
  • SEPs are listed in the What's Happening Post each week and suggested: put more details or where each stands in the process
  • Dedicated SEP channel in the Salt Community slack #sep
    • help to pull conversations from #general to #sep
  • We need to communicate through the mailing lists for SEPs, as well
  • Drafting more SEPs

Discussion Q&A

  • New branding for Salt, Janae will communicate via poll or survey on the new branding prior to finalization
  • Subreddit comment about not knowing about the Community Slack, this is obviously a huge miss
  • Website is getting an overhaul and will be a single source of truth
  • Hacks podcast this week was on Open Source
  • Community is a huge focus for 2021 and Janae is building a roadmap
  • Bringing back MeetUps - Virtual and hopefully in person later in the year, looking for speakers and topics, we want to promote our community! If you are interested contact [email protected]
  • There is more coming soon! let us know if you have suggestions
  • Updating Tutorial Docs
  • SaltConf21 does not equal Dang Spice even if the closed captioning thinks so
  • MDM was being looked at by the MacOS Working Group and they pivoted to support for Big Sur (not Big Sister like the closed captioning captured), we will get an update at their next meeting this month and communicate
  • We have not supported Android or for mobile devices, support for Apple laptops, but mainly we have supported Linux and Windows laptops
  • MacOS Working Group wanted to rethink the use of how they had approached device management, originally they were thinking of using proxy minions now they are thinking of Salt interacting with a service (not assault underwear as the closed captioning caught at 56:32 laughter ensued) like MDM service
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