History-7 X

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= HISTORY =
= for foundation-based RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX 7.x SERVER =
= Version: 7.x-6 25-Sep-2018 (List of announcements.) =
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On October 31, 2018: New Foundation Release - Survey fix
Hey everyone,
This release now forces the use of the offline survey collection package
until the backend processes are ready for a new upload mechanism.
Happy teaching!
--Rob
foundation{,0}-config/rht-usb
- rht-pushdesktop - force offline usage of survey at all times
===========================================================================
On September 25, 2018: New Foundation Release - Additional dualboot fix
Hey everyone,
This release is entirely about a late arriving problem and fix for the
dualboot configuration introduced last month.
Specifically, the autogeneration of the other operating system was not

happening for NTFS-based operating systems. That has been tested and
resolved using Windows 10 Professional Enterprise.
This release also keeps the older offline roster collection package
until the backend processes are ready for a new upload mechanism.
Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- foundation.ks - add ntfs-3g package
- use repo in %pre for updates/additional packages
- rhci-updates.iso - [deprecate] merge content into rhci-foundation.iso
- rht-external - fix certain starting configuration problems
===========================================================================
On August 22, 2018: New Foundation Release - RHA support and other fixes
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about adding support for RHA and dual boot
environments and Fedora 28.
Primarily we have added support for non-exclusive deployments with the
installation kernel argument of "dualboot" to not delete non-Linux
partitions. Review the documentation in ClassroomTroubleshooting.txt
around "Classes with other Operating Systems" to see the steps needed.
Filesystems have been a changing target for Fedora 28 where the

environment adds support for metadata_csum inside the filesystems
implemented on the USB device. This release properly disables the
new feature on filesystems created with rht-usb usbformat.
We also updated rht-pushdekstop to more easily support adding the

Offering ID to the online roster. Take a look at ClassroomSetup.txt for
information on using the online roster and remember to wait until the
end of class to mark the class complete.
Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- foundation.ks - add support for dualboot argument
- rhci-updates.iso - newer Firefox 60.1.0
- rht-usb - disable Fedora 28 metadata_csum on mke2fs for now
- rht-dualboot - new utility
- rht-external - make idempotent
- rht-wipeclassroom - add --nodualboot to wipe dualboot environments
- rht-vmctl - restrict virt-host-validate to qemu tests
- rht-verify-f0 - clean up sort order on output
- restrict virt-host-validate to qemu tests
Documentation
- ClassroomSetup - add online roster instructions
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add reference to dualboot installation argument
===========================================================================
On May 31, 2018: New Foundation Release - RHEL 7.5 and death of galaxyX
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about adding support for RHEL 7.5 and removing
support for the misguided galaxyX physical systems.
WARNING: desktop icons have moved! The Gnome3 desktop philosophy has been
pushing developers away from using desktop icons. We are now deploying
the VM icons and the roster/survey icons to the Applications-Education
menu.
WARNING: We have made a significant change to how manifests get deployed

to foundation0/classroom. Philosophically, only one course manifest is
allowed to be *active* at a time. Additional course manifests will be
quiesced (or inactive) when copied onto foundation0/classroom. You will
use a new verb f0activate to swap one of the quiesced manifests with the
active one. rht-setcourse will automatically call rht-usb f0activate.
EFI is here as a Tech Preview. We have added EFI boot/installation support

to booting from CD (rhci-foundation.iso), foundation.ks (installing to
hard drive), and DHCP/PXE (installing to hard drive across the network).
The interesting part that we want everyone to keep an eye out for: we were
keeping a bunch of ISC dhcpd configuration options from the 1990's and
needed to update. Our fear is that this may break some network boots in
the field. Please report any anomalies you encounter - aka situations that
used to work but now do not.
WARNING #1: We do not yet support EFI booting from USB. This is partially
due to the syslinux version in RHEL 7 not yet supporting EFI. This means
that for those of you that want to work with EFI, you will likely need to
carry an external DVD drive (USB) for installation of foundation0. The
student machines will likely be able to install via PXE. The timeline for
updating this may wait for RHEL 8 and is likely going to require a new and
different partitioning scheme for the USB device since EFI boot requires
an ESP (EFI System Partition) that is FAT formatted.
WARNING #2: EFI is for classroom activity only, not EXAM! They have had
zero time to evaluate what has been included here. This is only Tech
Preview. We are working with the certification team to assess and include
their support in a future release. That is likely when we will shift from
Tech Preview to fully supported.
We have added a new utility on foundation0 to make it easier to supply

information to Red Hat when problems arise. Take a look at the new
utility, rht-sosreport, which requires you pass it an argument of your
RHN ID to clarify the individual instructor that submitted the information.
You are requested to submit this as an attachment to the JIRA incident that
you filed, or to send the file with a description of the problem to the
author of RHCIfoundation, Robert Locke, rlocke@redhat.com. Please do not
send the tar/gzip to the various instructor lists.
Oh, and a quick footnote. The curriculum form of destroy for foundation0
has been added to the exam server with the same username/password for
destruction as foundation0.
All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

this one shortly after release is strongly recommended (and the latest
one always has the correct roster and survey packages).
Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- foundation.ks - add curriculum destroy to exam server
- add logic for EFI installation
- foundation2.ks - remove
- .iso - add support for EFI boot
- rht-usb - redesign f0 deployment/activation of manifests
- add --inplace to rsync calls
- new copyrsync verb (really should use keys)
- rht-wipeclassroom - remove second physical system support
- rht-clearcourse - remove second physical system support
- rht-f0finish - remove second physical system support
- adjust "hostname" to support anomalies (RH362)
- rht-discover - remove second physical system support
- add message to register file
- rht-showstate - sanely sort the systems
- rht-unregister - remove second physical system support
- rht-pushcourse - remove second physical system support
- rht-secure-fX - remove second physical system support
- rht-sosreport - new utility for collecting troubleshooting information
- rht-pushdesktop - move desktop icons to menu
- rht-vmicons - move desktop icons to menu
- dhcpd.conf - remove old logic to support EFI/PXE installs
redhat-training-{roster,survey}
- updated course lists and translations
- change chcon to semanage in %post
- generate error message to student when file not written
Documentation
- ClassroomSetup - remove second physical system support
- adjust slides documentation for reveal.js slides rpm
- correct roster/survey desktop filename references
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - remove second physical system support
- add reference to rht-sosreport
===========================================================================
On February 6, 2018: New Foundation Release - CL310 Release
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about adding support for VM group names for the
upcoming CL310 release. This feature may be used or added in other
courses in the future. This feature allows the curriculum developers to
define group names for rht-vmctl on a per course basis. Of course, this
is in addition to the default groups of all and everything.
A special thank you to Peter Tselios and Leon Robinson for their detailed
Jira reports that got me to rethink umask and permissions in rht-usb and
realize an oversight in the recent localized destroy option.

one always has the correct redhat-survey package).
Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- rhci-updates - update to Firefox 52.5.1
- foundation.ks - have destroy calculate boot partition (SETUP-186)
- rht-vmctl - add support for RHT_VMGRP and RHT_VMG_*
- add symlink support to xml files
- rht-vmctl.zenity - add support for RHT_VMGRP and RHT_VMG_*
- rht-pushcourse - add support for RHT_VMGRP and RHT_VMG_*
- add support for RHT_UTILITIES
- rht-setcourse - add support for RHT_VMGRP and RHT_VMG_*
- add support for RHT_UTILITIES
- rht-clearcourse - add support for RHT_UTILITIES
- rht-usb - fix usbremove when processing type: source
- fix usbadd when updating type: source
- re-fix umask difficulties (SETUP-142)
- rht-discover - resolve bugs around variables
- rht-unregister - resolve bug around fork
- rht-verify-f0 - fail on non-GigE
- shift date/time check to end
- rht-collectsurvey - more informative missing file messages
- updated course lists and translations
Documentation
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add mention of /var/tmp/labs/
===========================================================================
On November 15, 2017: New Foundation Release - welcome RHEL 7.4
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about adding RHEL 7.4 as a supported version

with additional cleanup. We are also officially retiring support for
RHEL 7.0 and 7.1 at the physical foundation layer.
Have you ever wanted the destroy option to still work even after your
foundation0 has been disconnected/wiped/reinstalled? The new destroy is
now fully enabled/distributed at time of installation (via the kickstart)
and password protected. rht-wipeclassroom will now just remove the
password protection, set destroy as default, and reboot.
Rosters and surveys, where did they go? A new release has moved the
deployment onto foundation0 for our offline collection. Assuming you
are using rht-pushdesktop and rht-collectsurvey, it is all automated
and transparent for you.... If you manually direct students to the
old URLs, the student will be asking you to use rht-pushdesktop to
give them a desktop icon. OK, the txt files will be stored on f0 under
/var/www/results/{roster,survey}/*.txt.
Updated Firefox. Yes, regardless of the RHEL version you are running,
the installation process will update Firefox (and dependencies) to the
currently available release on the foundation systems. This should
resolve the problems on certain redhat.com websites.

Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- add RHEL 7.4 boot files
- radical change to destroy - now works without foundation0/disconnected
- now applies distributed/included updates (fix Firefox)
- RHEL 7.4 - revert default icon size
- rht-collectsurvey - now needs -m to specify TARGETDIR
- new option -k does not unmount USB
- rht-pushdesktop - creates icons on f0 for demo/extra path
- rht-secure-fX - fixed setting of Grub2 password
- rht-clearcourse - make more resilient to support rht-usb f0remove
- no longer parallelized to support rht-usb f0remove
- rht-vmctl - option rename: -q|--quiet is now -y|--yes
- rht-usb - only unmount USB if we do something USB related
- f0remove summarizes errors at end
- f0validate now checks source file of loop mounts
- named - add alias training.ilt.example.com pointing to f0 (for surveys)
- logind.conf - ignore laptop lid closure (no longer suspend)
- rht-vmsetkeyboard - should now complain with improper keyboard passed
- rht-f0finish - use same keyboard setting code as rht-vmsetkeyboard
- new packages that replace old redhat-survey and deploys to f0
- dummy redhat-survey package for existing classroom VMs included
Documentation
- ClassroomSetup - adjust keyboard setting recommendations (long version)
- ClassroomReset - adjust references to rht-clearcourse
- - add reference to rht-usb f0remove
===========================================================================
On July 12, 2017: New Foundation Release - more cleanup
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about cleanup. Cleanup of code and features.
The keywords "all" and "everything" as used by rht-vmctl needed to be

handled better:
- when doing an "reset all" it will ask you only once whether you want
to reset all those machines. The same single question will be asked
for fullreset and poweroff verbs. Use "-i" if you prefer the old
behavior.
- when looking to "start all" the tool will now respect the variable
RHT_NOSTARTVMS found in /etc/rht, not starting those listed. This is
true of reset and fullreset verbs too.
- when looking to "reset all" first power off all the systems, then
remove all the ovl files, and finally start them all.
Have you ever wanted to allow the physical foundation systems to access
the internet without enabling the virtual machines/course layer to have
that same access? When you run "rht-external -c eno1" simply add -n or
--noclassroom to the end and the utility will skip running the
rht-config-nat utility on classroom.
A new utility has been introduced called rht-movebr0. The purpose is to

swap in a different physical NIC to act as the backing for br0, the
physical connection to all the student foundationX systems.
f0$ rht-movebr0 --status

f0$ rht-movebr0 --interface eno1

Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- radical change to nic detection to skip wlan and wwan adapters
- rht-external - fix static assignment (SETUP-171)
- - add --noclassroom to skip external access for VMs
- rht-verify-f0 - fix virtualization enabled detection
- rht-vmctl - fix virtualization enabled detection
- - rht_*_vm functions now take lists
- - reset|fullreset no poweroff all before ovl removal/start
- - reset|fullreset|poweroff now ask approval only once
- - anything doing a "start all" will respect RHT_NOSTARTVMS
- - new -i|--inquire option will confirm VMs to process
- - stop displaying error of missing known_hosts when stripping
- rht-pushcourse - fix some header output
- rht-movebr0 - new utility to swap the NIC used by br0 physically
- rht-discover - new utility to ping/register foundationX systems
- rht-unregister - new utility to remove foundationX registration
- rht-collectsurvey - pass RSYNCTARGET as argument (defaults to RHTINST)
- rht-wipeclassroom - explicitly poweroff all vms before wipe
Documentation
- ClassroomSetup - update rht-external to support --noclassroom
- - add reference to rht-movebr0
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add reference to rht-movebr0
- - add reference to rht-unregister/rht-discover
===========================================================================
On April 26, 2017: New Foundation Release - cleanup
Hey everyone,
This release is mostly about cleanup. Cleanup of code and features.
There are ssh keys to the kingdom on foundation0. While we have been
waiting for rht-f0finish to be used to secure foundation0, we are taking
the additional step of disabling autologin of kiosk right from the onset
now. This only affects foundation0. We continue to autologin kiosk on
each student system. This affected Step 4 of ClassroomSetup.txt.
Along those lines, we all know not to share the default privileged
password with students. With this release, rht-f0finish will additionally
secure GRUB on foundation0. A new utility, rht-secure-fX will allow you
to change the root and GRUB passwords on every student physical system.
One additional change in behavior: rht-external now uses prefix when

statically configuring the uplink interface and no longer supports using
netmask.
I know Will has been asking for this next one for a *long* time....
Two new utilities: rht-pushdesktop and rht-collectsurvey are used to

simplify operational tasks around the colection of roster and survey
information in class. Details can be found in ClassroomSetup.txt, but
here is the gist:
f0$ rht-pushdesktop all|# roster|survey

will create a desktop icon on the fX (or all) that will launch firefox
pointed at either the roster or survey. You can insert a --remove to
eliminate the desktop icon once collection is done.
f0$ rht-collectsurvey
will assume that you have already inserted your "approved/functional"
RHTINST USB device, will mount if needed, and will copy from the classroom
VM /var/www/ks/state/*.txt to the USB device under a directory called
surveys. It will also automatically unmount the device.

Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- new versioning for migration to git
- correct br0 IP addresses for standalone
- filter floppy drives as valid targets (SETUP-155)
- add grub password
- new versioning for migration to git
- rht-f0finish - execute rht-verify-classroom automatically
- - will get/define even if NOSTART
- - will modify GRUB password with --secure
- rht-external - block IPv6 DNS entries
- - fix when PEERDNS is missing
- - nmcli con reload is sufficient (just need to pause)
- - use nmcli for everything - stop editing ifcfg files
- - static config uses prefix now, no longer supports netmask
- rht-usb - copy and copyusb can now "replace" a manifest on f0/classroom
- - usb{,size}{add,remove} cleans up old artifacts (SETUP-158)
- - usb{,size}{add,remove} skip missing artifacts (SETUP-151)
- - usborphans lists extra files on usb
- rht-wipeclassroom - wipe grub password first (SETUP-156)
- rht-vmicons - now creates rht-vmctl.desktop
- firewalld default zone is trusted
- sudoers now includes rht-usb and rht-collectsurvey
- never autologin kiosk on foundation0 (still does on foundationX)
- rht-secure-fX - change root and GRUB passwords on student physical systems
- rht-pushdesktop - new utility to push/remove roster/survey icons on fX
- rht-collectsurvey - new utility to copy roster/survey to RHTINST USB
Documentation
- ClassRHAPrep - additional doc for Red Hat Academy (don't use IC)
- ClassroomSetup - rht-f0finish now runs rht-verify-classroom
- - documents rht-pushdesktop and rht-collectsurvey
- - autologin of kiosk disabled on f0 by default
- - documents rht-secure-fX
- - update rht-external using prefix, not netmask
- ClassroomReset - update rht-external using prefix, not netmask
===========================================================================
On November 30, 2016: New Foundation Release - official 7.3 support
Hey everyone,
With the release of RHEL 7.3 on November 3, we are offering a new

release of foundation (UCF). This release on 7.2 will be marked
"Best" on Instructor Central, but feel free to use 7.3 or an earlier
RHEL version. If you have stuck with the v4 Best, please also review
the announcement from July 27, 2016 which introduced v5 for some of
the changes.
This release includes a newer redhat-survey package that unifies the

forms with the online version used by VT and self-paced learners.
Also, be forewarned: rht-usb will no longer abort if you are not root.
Of course, if you are doing something in rht-usb that actually needed
root privileges (anything with the USB or deployment on foundation0)
that rht-usb will get ugly. Why the change? Well there are a number of
verbs in rht-usb that do not require root privileges (cache management)
and should be allowed to be executed without becoming root. Yes, I want
reports from you on the ugliness you step in so that I can make some
more adjustments to make those things less ugly.
There is one annoyance with the RHEL 7.3 implementation, I have yet to
figure out how to work around. The desktop icons will be squished in
the upper left hand corner for you and the students the first time you
login. Right-click and choose "Organize Desktop by Name" to better
align the icons. If anyone has an idea on how to "fix" this, please
let me know. <grin/>

Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- update to 7.3 GA bits
- additional support for "standalone"
- add back in default gateway
- updates to ravello build (devel system)
- change disk detection to stop keying on removable (server-class HW)
- firewalld patching for 7.3 to stop blanking ZONE
- rht-vmctl - add DEFINED to status
- rht-verify-f0 - clarify networking output
- check resolv.conf
- rht-external - display more useful information (IP address)
- add support for divergent NAME/DEVICE/ifcfg
- rht-usb - add usbdiff verb
- add icmf before artifacts (better cleanup)
- make logs world-writable
- do not abort if not root (just ERROR message)
- experimental new rsync* verbs
- sudoers now more explicit on commands to allow execution (SETUP-149)
Documentation
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add additional lab script information
===========================================================================
On July 27, 2016: New Foundation Release - first v5
Hey everyone,
So new courses have brought new significant requirements for our beloved
foundation (UCF). While v4+ is required for courses taking advantage of
private networking, v5+ will be required for courses that cannot fit on
a single machine per student.
So here is the gist of the change. The private bridges on each physical
host need to be tied together as if we were running on a single machine.
We have done this by switching the private bridges to openvswitch and
implementing a layer 2 tunnel between the two hosts, foundationX and
galaxyX. The problem with tunnels is that it messes with the MTU of the
devices attached to the bridges and since all the machines are on a
single broadcast domain, no MTU "discovery" is being performed. This
means that all VMs tied to that bridge/tunnel need to have their MTU
properly "adjusted" and MATCH. So do not try to tweak existing courses
to use the two-host setup because it frankly will not work. The
two-host configuration is only supported with courses specifically
designed for it, like the upcoming CL210v8.
Another larger update is the replacement of rht-config-nat on classroom

with rht-external as a utility run on foundation0. The intent here is to
use a physical NIC directly as the uplink (rather than having it be a
slave of br1). This should broaden our support of using any type of NIC
for uplink communication (second Ethernet NIC, USB dongle, WiFi, etc.).
Technically rht-config-nat is still there and the virtual layer is still
routed through classroom. The difference now is that the physical layer
will be routed and name serviced by foundation0 to the outside world as
will the classroom VM. See ClassroomSetup.txt for instructions.
This release includes some suggestions from both content developers and
the field. Thank you for continuing to use Jira to make those requests
as it makes it so much easier than me tracking emails sent....
Couple of interesting changes/enhancements:

- must run usbmkboot every update/add of an RHCIfoundation manifest
- usbmkboot should hopefully support newer extlinux
- try out "f0 lsicmf" at the boot: prompt

one always has the correct redhat-survey package). You may notice that
the TQMs have cleaned up Instructor Central eliminating the old
RHCIfoundation releases and should be cleaned up from your caches and
USBs.
Happy teaching!
--Rob
rhci-foundation
- re-add support for second physical host now called galaxyX
- two host solution requires openvswitch (now included in manifest)
- private bridges now configured via rpm rather than kickstart
- add support for RHT_PRIVUSEOVS
- shift default gateway to (deprecated) /etc/sysconfig/network
- no longer carry default vesamenu.c32 for extlinux (only isolinux)
- add support for variables RHT_NO{START,FINISH}VMS
- add lsicmf option to f0 kickstart
- add oldversion support to boot.msg
- trial support for standalone
- br1 no longer physically backed
- new disk discovery to support PCI NVMe disks (and not break existing?)
- yell/abort when boot media (CD) doesn't match version on USB
- add line for exam use of version.txt
- private bridges now configured via rpm rather than kickstart
- reintroduce second physical host
- continue shifting location of private bridge conversion
- set PreferredAuthentications to publickey only in .ssh/config
- add initial support for RHT_NO{START,FINISH}VMS
- network service needed (for openvswitch support)
- add rht-sethosts and documentation references to 2 host configuration
- shift br1 configuration to foundation0-config.rpm
- br1 now unbacked and provides DHCP lease to classroom
- rht-external - new utility for uplink configuration (SETUP-1)
- rht-pushcourse - implements/tears down OVS tunnel (RHT_PRIVUSEOVS)
- separate variable push loop from VM push loop
- rht-spawn - add galaxy support
- add 1 minute delay to start
- rht-vmctl - auto-add virtualport to network definitions
- add support for RHT_ENROLLMENT -ge 512
- rht-wipeclassroom - moved to /usr/local/sbin and abort if not root
- rht-f0finish - remotely process RHT_GVMS
- register.sh - mask foundation0 to prevent creation (SETUP-138)
- rht-verify-f0 - add pluggability
- add check for minimum UCF release
- add DNS checks
- rht-usb - usbmkboot uses client installed vesamenu.c32 (and libs)
- validation of icmf on read (with polite abort if bad)
- attempt to resolve permissions problem in rsync
- incorporate more checks in _read_manifest
- properly trap each call to _read_manifest
Documentation
- ClassPrep - update usbmkboot instructions based on new behavior
- ClassroomSetup - expand USB removal to wait for shutdown (SETUP-133)
- change hostX reference to galaxyX
- add step 7a for installing secondary physical system
- add references to older technology installation
- add reference to lsicmf kickstart argument
- replace rht-config-nat with rht-external
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add section on classes with more than twenty
- change br1 to unbacked
- add reference to missing/empty rht-locale
- History - add this release announcement
===========================================================================
On November 24, 2015: New Foundation Release - introducing 7.2
Hey everyone,
So after being quiet for so long, here we go again.
Some miscommunication between yours truly and the certification team

had me releasing a busted exam installer. Fixed. Of course the moral
of the story is to always keep at least two versions of RHCIfoundation
manifests in your cache. You can always use "usbadd" to downgrade your
USB device when necessary.
The big news today is that with the release of RHEL 7.2 last week, it
seemed appropriate to release a physical RHCIfoundation supporting it
and support for newer hardware. As we did the last time a new RHEL
version was introduced, we will continue to set the previous RHEL to
be "Best" (in this case 7.1). For those needing more "leading edge"
hardware support, we do encourage the use of the latest version (7.2)
available. We also continue to support RHEL 7.0, though if you are
using nested virtualization in a course we recommend using at least
RHEL 7.1. We welcome reports from the field on both successful and
unsuccessful use of RHEL 7.2 to gauge our shift to making it "Best" in
the future.
Also fixed was the rht-setcourse bug reported on contractor-list over

the weekend, though obviously we prefer that there would have been a
Jira on that.
Happy teaching!
--Rob
Detailed list of changes:
rhci-foundation
- fix exam installation (missing string replacement) (SETUP-129)
- update RHEL 7.2 source bits to GA
- add copy of .iso version.txt to /root/rhci-version.txt (SETUP-131)
- rht-usb - add verbs cachef0 and cacheusb
- deprecate use of has_key (prep for Python 3)
- proper clean up of boot with usb{remove,add}
- rht-gethosts - be silent if missing rht-vm-hosts on f0 (SETUP-130)
Documentation
- History - add this release announcement
===========================================================================
On November 4, 2015: New Foundation Release - first v4
Hey everyone,
So new foundation releases have been rather quiet. Sure we had a bit of
activity with some newer redhat-survey packages, but no real changes to
the foundation layer bits since June.
We have previously intimated some new "private networking" that is going
to be used in some new courses. It will eliminate the calculation of X
by students in our material and perhaps more importantly will allow us
to pre-install layered products in the images. Well, here we go. And,
just to be clear: it has *no effect on existing courses*. This is for
future course releases.
The other major feature in this release is more to help me as I prepare

for future RHEL releases at the physical layer. Keeping parallel forked
trees of code was hopefully unnecessary and this release merges the
foundation rpms (note the version is now 7.x) and merges the build tree
for the bootable iso. This should allow us to extend the feasibility of
supporting more RHEL releases giving the field the flexibility to match
with the underlying hardware, an original goal of Universal Classroom
Foundation (UCF). PS. It also brings 7.0 back up to matching 7.1.
But, the reality is that there are a myriad of little things that happen
in this release given the time span. Many were inspired by lessons
learned as we scaled larger at Red Hat Summit 2015. Most are inspired by
you, the instructor in the field, with your Jira reports and notes to
the email lists (though Jira is better than email...). Thank you!
**** PLEASE READ THIS PART ****

With feedback from the non-US instructors, we have introduced a new
utility called rht-f0finish that minimally starts all the VMs on the
instructor f0 system. But, it optionally can tie in the previous steps
of rht-secure-f0 and rht-vmsetkeyboard for the instructor VMs. This
combines together the "save" operations that were previously redundant.
It also streamlines the launching of the VMs on f0 in to a single step
(yes, I care about speed on Monday).
The other significant Monday morning change is that rht-pushcourse now

pushes the qcow2 files out to the student machines (well, technically
it's a parallel pull - you monitor it with rht-showstate). Doesn't
start the VMs, but does get them downloaded.
Please read the new (and improved?) ClassroomSetup.txt file carefully.

**** END OF ME TRYING TO WARN YOU ****
There is one change to rht-vmctl that may confuse you. The term "all"
on foundation0 no longer includes the classroom VM (or other
infrastructure VMs). We have added a term called "everything" that will
include both the demonstration and infrastructure VMs. The term "all"
now operates identically on both f0 and fX matching just the
demonstration or lab VMs.
The other benefit for those that had embraced rht-each is the
introduction of "--spawn" as an option which will allow a parallelizing
of the activity across all the student foundationX systems. You will
monitor the progress of the spawn with "rht-showstate all" on f0 with
status messages of when the activity was Spawned or Completed.
As always, we love those Jira reports!
--Rob
Detailed list of changes:

rhci-foundation
- merge rhel7.0/rhel7.1 trees to rhel7.x - still produces unique iso
- add privbr0 to kickstart
- update "ravello" branch for f0 building (secure, static br1, etc)
- clean up "exam" branch
- unhide "exam" option
- Makefile removes 7.1 kdump lines from 7.0 kickstart (anaconda fix)
- destroy kickstart supports poweroff
- remove hostX support (for now) - see UCFv4 pdf - IC Addl Resources
- move rht-usb to foundation{,0}-config tree
- merge rhel7.0/rhel7.1 trees to rhel7.x
- move rht-usb to foundation{,0}-config tree
- dhcpd.service - ugly hack for fewer failures needing simple restart
- rht-vmctl - shift "all" to be the same on f0 as fX
- introduce "everything" to include RHT_VM0 on f0
- add optional argument to save (to name instead of date)
- remove always does a virsh undefine
- shift save and restore to use rsync
- shift virsh define to get instead of start
- add lockfile to prevent concurrent gets (SETUP-122)
- rht-f0finish - new utility to simplify Monday morning
- combines steps to start and optionally secure/keyboard
- stall to wait for rc.local to complete (SETUP-128)
- rht-secure-f0 - disable autologin on f0 (SETUP-115)
- utility removed - incorporated in rht-f0finish
- rht-vmsetkeyboard - stall to wait for rc.local to complete (SETUP-128)
- rht-showstate - display contents of register (add msg to register.sh)
- add --vms to show libvirt statuses of VMs
- rht-spawn - new utility to parallelize fX activity
- reports via msg in register.sh (view with rht-showstate)
- rht-each - add --spawn (calls rht-spawn)
- rht-pushcourse - run "rht-vmctl get all" on each fX via rht-spawn
- add --novms to bypass now default spawned get
- rht-clearcourse - use rht-spawn by default
- rht-pushkernelargs - fix missing parens (thanks Razique!)
- rht-gethosts - new utility to retrieve private hosts
- called by rht-vmicons and rht-clearcourse
- rht-wipeclassroom - add --poweroff to turn off on destroy (SETUP-110)
- add --reinstall to reinstall same fX (SETUP-124)
- add memtest to PXE menu
- rht-usb - stop uninstalling duplicate rpms in f0remove
- _chmod now detects recursion (might fix some boot issues)
- add source size and dest exists to _rsync output
- change directory listing/sorting to be "natural"
- immutable off ldlinux.sys in usbmkboot (fight extlinux)
- support "foundation" in usage in icmf - merge ILT/VT/ROLE
Documentation
- ClassroomSetup - pretty radical change for Monday - read carefully
- ClassroomTroubleshooting - add reference to memtest available via PXE
- History - new file containing all announcements (SETUP-94)
===========================================================================
On June 4, 2015: New Foundation Release
Howdy folks,
It's been three months and with Summit looming, we had some minor bug
annoyances and needed improvements. So, I just finished uploading a new,
hopefully minimal update to the foundation bits on Instructor Central.
The significant declaration with this email is that we have now elected
to make the later RHEL 7.1 version of RHCIfoundation to be the "Best" to
use. For those of you teaching RHCE classes, yes, this means you will
need a bigger stick since it will need to hold both the RHEL 7.0 iso
*and* the RHEL 7.1 iso on the one stick. Hopefully many of you have
already addressed that need.
Just to clarify the management of your USB. The USB will only support
one "technology" (RHEL version) for the RHCIfoundation manifest, but
will support multiple <course>-<technology> manifests for regular course
manifests. In other words, you can store RH124 for both RHEL70 and
RHEL63 on the same USB running on top of the newest RHCIfoundation that
is running RHEL71.....
So, what am I introducing?

RHCIfoundation-RHEL70-2.r31619-ILT-7-en_US.icmf
For the eagle-eyed among you, you may see that the release value has
gone from 2 to 3 for the RHEL 7.1 version (but not the RHEL 7.0
version). Yes, a few changes are being made behind the scenes, but only
to the RHEL 7.1 version. Nothing to announce on that front today, but
hopefully later this summer there will be some benefits available to
you. This may, in fact, be the last release on RHEL 7.0.
So, what can I announce with these updates?
rhci-foundation/rht-usb
- expanded the course prefixes
- moved the location of foundation0-config
(to protect against prying student eyes - SETUP-102)
- added a new method for better language support (7.1 only)
- try adding more fonts (7.1 only)
foundation{,0}-config
- fix numeric tests in several looping tools
- switch rpms to noarch
- add --keep option to rht-vmctl remove and rht-clearcourse
(for custom courses that go back and forth - thanks Grega!)
- rht-vmctl support for multiple checkpoints (listsaves, restore)
(primarily for Summit, but who knows, may help elsewhere)
- fix [[ ] conditional mismatch syntax error (SETUP-99)
- fix output in rht-showstate (SETUP-98)
- fix the looping of several utilities
Documentation
- add references to rht-verify-f0 --validate
(thanks Mike for helping find that oversight)
- merge rht-secure-f0 and rht-vmctl start all steps in ClassroomSetup
- add references on /var/www/register/ in ClassroomTroubleshooting
- add references to --keep in ClassroomReset
As always, submit those Jira reports to let me know how this release is
working (or not) for you....
--Rob
===========================================================================
On March 12, 2015: Updated foundation bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
I just finished uploading a new pretty significant update to the

foundation bits on Instructor Central. As some of you may have noticed,
Red Hat introduced RHEL 7.1 this past week, technically 7 days ago.
One of the fundamental goals of the new Universal Classroom Foundation

was to divorce the RHEL version of the physical layer (RHCIfoundation)
from the course layer. By quickly supporting the newest version of RHEL
at the physical layer, we should improve hardware support in the field.
And, in the spirit of Open Source, we are focused on release early and
release often. The newest is the best.
So, today, I announce the release of two new RHCIfoundation manifests:

one based on RHEL 7.0 and one based on RHEL 7.1. I am declaring the RHEL
7.0 one to be the "best" for now. But if you choose to run the RHEL 7.1
version (which I would love for you to do) that means you will need the
space to support both RHEL versions (dvd iso) on your USB device for the
existing courses that are based on RHEL 7.0. New courses will most
likely be based on RHEL 7.1. But as you look to support multiple courses
on a single USB, you need to support whatever version RHCIfoundation
supports and the various course manifests. And, yes, re-running
usbmkboot is probably needed if you go with 7.1.
Just to clarify the management of your USB. The USB will only support
one "technology" (RHEL version) for the RHCIfoundation manifest, but
will support multiple <course>-<technology> manifests for regular course
manifests. In other words, you can store RH124 for both RHEL70 and
RHEL63 on the same USB running on top of the newest RHCIfoundation that
is running RHEL71.....
So, what am I introducing?

For the moment you can "choose" the RHCIfoundation to run, but be aware
that we generally believe that the later RHEL version is better. For
example, we believe that nested virtualization works better on RHEL 7.1
than on RHEL 7.0 for those courses that may desire it.
So, what is "new" with these updates?
1. rht-usb adds the verbs size, usbsizeadd, and usbsizeremove to display

the sizing of those activities and display what a manifest totals as.
2. foundationX will import the curriculum rpm gpg key by default.
3. foundation0 will prevent wireless adapters from being parented by br1

since there is little prayer that it will work since kernel 2.6.33 (see
below).
4. Change PXE menu to not display "fX" as it confuses to be a function

key. Thanks Phil!
5. Update
- /root/bin/rht-wipeclassroom
- /usr/local/bin/rht-pushkernelargs
- /usr/local/bin/rht-showstate
- /usr/local/bin/rht-pushcourse
- /usr/local/bin/rht-clearcourse
to process "registered" fX/hX systems with keyword "all" or the new
"registered" rather than being on a numerical loop, but add a "loop"
argument that will process to RHT_MAXSTATIONS as before. Thank Lars!
6. Add a new utility on f0 called rht-each that will

- "rht-each cmd" will execute "cmd" on physical hosts
- "rht-each -c src dst" will scp src to dst on physical hosts
processing on each registered host
7. An updated redhat-survey that adds some new courses.... Check with

the TQMs for details on 7.x-53.21. Thanks Greg!
Another quick heads up that we just learned about. Wireless adapters

cannot be parented by a bridge, only ethernet adapters can. So, we only
support the "uplink" or "classroom" interfaces to be Ethernet at this
stage. This is in line with the Hardware requirements document
circulated by the Operations group. Yes, we will explore opportunities
to add Wireless for an uplink in a future release (see Jira SETUP-1).
As always, submit those Jira reports to let me know how this release is
working (or not) for you....
--Rob
===========================================================================
On February 5, 2015: Updated foundation bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
I just finished uploading another minor update to the foundation bits on

Instructor Central. Can you believe it's been three months since the
last "release" in November of last year?
Again, just because we have released some updated bits does not preclude
you from sticking with your "happy" bits on Monday if you do not feel
you can adequately test these new bits for yourself before then.
However, we do expect and hope that you will eventually move to these
newer bits....
So, Gracie, what do we have available for the instructors?
A new release of foundation called

And, George, you may have noticed that the release number was
incremented. I know I said it was a minor release, but we did "enhance"
rht-vmctl for a future course (RH318v3.5). In addition to
supporting .qcow2 files, it now supports .iso files. In the case of that
course, we want to be able to PXE boot without a "boot menu" that is not
available generically in the ROLE modality. Gets us "back in sync" on
that front....
Gracie, so what things have been updated for the instructors?
Well, George, the rht-usb utility has received some updates based on my
eavesdropping on the concerns and desires for the icrm tool:
- support virtual loop devices in usbmkboot
- block use of pathnames in manifestfilename input
- add verb usbupdate (list "newer"; prompt, then replace on USB)
- restrict usbupdate (and usbadd) to modality ILT
- add verb f0list (list manifests on f0)
- add verb f0remove (remove manifest from f0 and unique artifacts)
Gracie, any changes to the other foundation pieces?
Yes, George, a number of recent Jira reports have been resolved (amongst
other things we noticed)....
rht-secure-f0
- supports hostnames of vmname, vmnameX, and vmname.podX
- silence password prompt (prompt twice now) (SETUP-89)
rht-vmsetkeyboard
- supports hostnames of vmname, vmnameX, and vmname.podX
rc.local-foundation0
- change method of timezone extraction to be more "generic" for Will
rht-wipeclassroom
- improper use of RHT_VMTREE fixed (SETUP-85)
rht-verify-f0
- use virt-host-validate to check virt enabled/disabled (SETUP-90)
- make hardware disk check driver independent (support vda)
- generate log file rht-verify-*.log (SETUP-84)
- fails on missing entries from /content/ks/rht-locale
rht-vmctl
- use virt-host-validate to check virt enabled/disabled (SETUP-90)
- add support for ISO disks (in addition to qcow2) (RH318)
- remove "all" from zenity front end
- remove "save" and "fullreset" from zenity front end (SETUP-69)
Documentation
- add reference to "dot" files - bad rsync
- add reference to usbupdate
- remove references to EPEL as PyYAML is now in RHEL 6.6
- add references to rht-verify-*.log
rpmbuild
- make libvirt-client an explicit requires
Gracie, that list is too long.... What do the instructors really need to
know?
Well, George, have you ever been in a classroom where virtualization was
disabled in the BIOS? Both rht-verify-f0 and rht-vmctl will now complain
when they detect that! Yes, we figured out a consistent way to test for
it using "virt-host-validate".
We also have found that the extraction of the timezone setting was not
universal. The symptom was that the student foundationX installs would
all prompt for the Date/Time settings. We have "fixed" the extraction to
work better but have also updated rht-verify-f0 to fail if it is missing
from the rht-locale file.
Wow, Gracie, those are two areas I can see having been problems for the
instructors. What about operations Gracie? Anything new from them in
here?
Yes, this release includes a new redhat-survey rpm that looks to make
more consistent the course "numbering" to always be the number without
the exam. Thanks to Greg Hosler and team for supplying these updates.
What's on the horizon Gracie? These updates seem to be slowing down.
Yes, George, it looks like we are staying on top of the Jira reports,
but there are always new innovations for us to try out. For example, we
may see an update to RHEL 7 in the coming months from Engineering, and
it would be good for us to update the foundation/physical layer to RHEL
7.1 while leaving the current courses alone to perhaps help with better
hardware support that may cut down on the training sites that require
kernel arguments. At least that is the hope!
Thanks again to all the instructors for using this stuff week after week
and helping us to enhance it! Remember, if you don't create the Jira
report, we don't know to fix it! Keep those Jira reports coming!!
Say good night Gracie....
Good night Gracie.
--Gracie (aka Rob)
===========================================================================
On November 26, 2014: Updated foundation bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
I just finished uploading another minor update to the foundation bits on

Instructor Central.
you from sticking with your "happy" bits on Monday if you do not feel
you can adequately test these new bits for yourself before then.

Gracie, anything "interesting" in this release?
Gracie is very excited about what George did. George has created a
zenity front end to rht-vmctl. Try out the new desktop icon called
"Manage VMs" and see if this is a little easier for some of your
students versus the command line rht-vmctl (remember the command line
still has tab completion if you haven't noticed that yet).
But what about Jira reports Gracie?
George and I have been spending some after hours cycles and there are a
few closed reports with this release:
1) SETUP-51 - properly set keyboards on non-graphical RHEL7 VMs
(certainly seen as a problem in CL210 classes, though we still don't
support changing the keyboard on the rhs storage server for now -
requires an image change to fix that).
2) SETUP-67 - sequence the start of libvirtd *after* the start of
nfs-server on foundation0. This should solve the problem of rebooting
foundation0 and classroom not starting correctly. Remember that with
each reboot you should be re-running the rht-verify-f0 and
rht-verify-classroom scripts. Do note that for those that have noticed
the "slowness" of nfs-server starting up on foundation0, you will now
see a "missing" interface until the nfs-server comes up, namely the
virbr1 which is created by libvirtd cannot be created until the
nfs-server finishes coming up now.
3) SETUP-78 - a suggestion from our instructors in APAC through Greg
suggested that we add a GPXE option on the rhci-foundation.iso similar
to the one that is available on the RHCX iso.
Gracie, what about the stuff I was working on that precipitated the last
release?
George, you always know how to keep Gracie busy on the weekends. We have
modified rht-usb and the foundation.ks to "support" multiple
"technologies" of a given course. rht-usb still *replaces* an older
"release" of a given course-technology pair when you run usbadd, but,
now, it will allow multiple different course-technology pairs on your
USB stick/drive.... Of course, this then confuses the foundation.ks when
you pass the "course" as an argument. Now, if you pass just a "course",
you will get the "latest" technology that is available on the USB stick.
If you would prefer to install an "older" technology, you would need to
pass "course-technology" as the argument. This is primarily driven by
the work to put the RHCE 6.3 courses on top of UCF, but will certainly
ease the transition when the OpenStack team releases their new courses
every six months.....
Wow, Gracie, this list is getting long again....
Oh, George, there are some more "little" things too:

1) rht-verify-f0: displaying some more interesting cpuinfo flags related
to future potential use of virt-in-virt passthrough.
2) foundationX: we enabled the kernel flag for virt-in-virt but are not
yet using it in any of our VMs yet.
3) rht-usb: hopefully fixed the "timing" issue that generated some rc 1
errors on usbmkboot when setting the boot flag
4) rht-locale: trying to better "scrape" the timezone information, so
those that kept having to manually remove "--no-ntp" should hopefully
not have to do that anymore.
5) registration process: we started experimenting with a "registration"
of foundationX systems at the end of their kickstart. Take a peak
in /var/www/register/ after installing some foundationX systems. We
aren't using it anywhere yet, but thought I'd mention its existence.
So, Gracie, I hear there was a new report this morning about a problem
we haven't fixed yet?
Yes, George, we are good and responsive, but sometimes we need to take a
little time to fix certain cases. We have a new SETUP-80 Jira report
that has identified a problem with performing a "reset" of foundation0
transitioning from one of the RHCE classes over to an OSP class (or the
reverse). Thank you to Shashi Kumar Unni for this report (and the
clarity of the testing you did!!!). I have added a warning to the new
ClassroomReset.txt, but it turns out that we have some "conflicts" in
the content rpms that we had not yet noticed until today. So, the
"repurpose" of foundation0 is only going to be supported in switching
between courses that are of the same "platform". What that really means
is that we are only supporting transitions within courses that use the
same content rpm. So you can switch between RH124 and RH134 for example,
but switching between RH254 and CL210 will not work. You will need to
use the "wipe" instructions for that transition currently. And, yes, we
do know that there may be some content rpms that do not conflict and the
transition will work, we just aren't going to support it until we can
make it work universally.
Gracie, can you see in to the future?

Well, George, we have some development work being done to enhance the
foundation layer with a fencing agent that should allow us to bring the
clustering courses fully in to the UCF world without allowing a
violation of the separation of hardware and virtual that we are trying
to enforce....
Thanks again to all the instructors for using this stuff week after week
and helping us to enhance it! Remember, if you don't create the Jira
report, we don't know to fix it! Keep those Jira reports coming!!
--Gracie (aka Rob)
===========================================================================
On October 24, 2014: Updated foundation bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
Gracie apologizes for the Friday release, but George is working on a

project that will need some QA help in the coming weeks that will require
this minor update to foundation.
you from sticking with your "happy" bits on Monday if you do not feel you
can adequately test these new bits for yourself before then.

Gracie, anything "interesting" in this release?
Well, it's always interesting when we hear from Greg Hosler and the TQM
team who have given us a new redhat-survey.
Also Greg found a couple of bugs for us!!
What sort of bugs Gracie?

- SETUP-61 from Greg found that rht-clearcourse didn't work when we did a
single station, though we could always clear them "all"
- Greg also felt there should be an easier way to "Secure" our systems for
the instructors so we added a tool called rht-secure-f0
- Lars gave us the idea for rht-setmaxstations in SETUP-58, though
admittedly, long term, we need to come up with a "registration process"
for foundationX systems for classrooms that get deployed with "gaps"....
What changes did you have to make for George, Gracie?
Well, rht-usb wasn't really paying attention to the Generation of a stick
which will be needed going forward as we try to retire trainingforums and
elvis.
Is that all Gracie?

No, George made us realize that rht-vmctl should not really be relying on
the classroom VM to download the VM images. It violates a principle of the
founding fathers: the separation of hardware and virtual layers. Gracie
was trying to be too "sneaky" and prevent students from launching their
VMs when classroom is not running, by downloading via classroom. The tool
now directly downloads from foundation0....
This does mean that you may see more "questions" from students who may
have booted their VM when classroom was offline for some reason, so they
didn't receive an IP address or hostname perhaps. Just keep an eye out for
that.
Gracie, can you see in to the future?

No, George! But these update emails keep getting shorter and shorter....
That's a good thing right?
Thanks to all the instructors for using this stuff week after week and
helping us to enhance it! Keep those Jira's coming!
--Rob
===========================================================================
On September 30, 2014: New RHCIfoundation bits
Howdy folks,
I just want to take a moment to thank those instructors that have been
filling out Jira reports with not only "bugs" but also enhancement
requests! Y'all have kept Geoge and I busy over the last month....
So, available with this announcement is

RHCIfoundation-RHEL70-1.r26589-ILT-7-en_US.icmf.
No particular urgency with this release, though it does correct the

problem with formatting the stick on RHEL7 or Fedora and then trying to
use usbmkboot (thanks Lee for keeping me focused on that one!).
As a background on that little problem. Turns out that the extlinux

facility uses 32-bit data structures when reading the stick filesystem.
The new default on RHEL 7 and Fedora 20 is to enable 64-bit support in the
superblock of the ext4 filesystem that we use - see /etc/mke2fs.conf (and
notice that each implements it differently in there). The fun is that
RHEL6, which doesn't yet support 64-bit ext4, will fail the mkfs if you
try to pass the -O ^64bit to it. So, bottom line, we need to disable the
64-bit data structures at the time that we format in order to support
extlinux if we want a bootable stick. Yes, this may mean that you have to
reformat your stick before making it bootable.
This release will also try to prevent you from corrupting your stick by
overfilling it when adding manifests. Thanks to Peter for this idea!
As always, please let us know if you find problems or other enhancement

ideas by filling out a Jira!
--Rob
Changelog
---------
rht-usb
- add --verbose option to bring back all the detail to the screen (not
just the log /tmp/rht-usb-<date>.log
- add disk space usage report to usblist
- add disk space check/abort to usbadd
- add disk space calculation to usbremove
- add support for "virtual sticks" for Red Hat Academy
- fix usbformat on RHEL7/Fedora to properly support extlinux and usbmkboot
rht-verify-f0
- add in some hardware reporting/warnings (CPU flags, memory, NIC speed)
rht-vmsetkeyboard
- fix support for RHT_VM0
Documentation
- add warning on full/corrupt media
- add sync to follow dd in prepping USB stick
- add substep to correct local time on foundation0
===========================================================================
On September 2, 2014: New Foundation Layer Bits
Hi folks,
So, I didn't release last Friday because people didn't like Friday
releases.... But today, I offer for your amusement a new
RHCIfoundation-RHEL70-1.r26059....
What are the highlights?
The first thing you will notice is that rht-usb is a whole lot less
chatty. That chattiness is now being sent to a log file
/tmp/rht-usb-<date>.log. This should make it easier for you to submit the
output from rht-usb by simply forwarding the log. It should also make it
easier for you to "follow" the lessened output on screen.
The second thing you will probably not notice is that we finally did a
whole lot more testing of the "second" physical machine and found some
things were missing. That has now been corrected. Of course, none of our
existing courses require/support a second physical machine, but there will
be one coming!!! Work on that course precipitated the corrections here....
The third thing are a couple of responses to your feedback:

- rht-vmctl now generates some readable errors when there is a problem
with curl (the download mechanism from content)
- rht-verify-f0 now separates the foundation layer checks from the VM
layer checks with some documentation updates related to that
- rht-add-kernel-args has been "moved" out of reach of the students
Lastly, you will see an announcement from Greg Hosler about an update to
redhat-survey that is included here.
There is no "urgency" to update to these bits, but any course announced

after this will have only been tested on these later bits.
Jira is waiting.....
--Rob
Changelog:
1) rht-usb
- shift most output to /tmp/rht-usb-<date>.log
2) foundation{,2}.ks
- clean up support for hostX (second physical system for students)
- direct limited output from rht-usb to rht-ks-post.log
3) Documentation
- update docs with new options mentioned
4) rht-vmctl
- add curl failure generating error messages
- add support for --gui option for future use
5) rht-verify-f0
- separate core foundation0 checks from course checks
- add --nocourse for use when parallelize course load
6) rht-{set,push}course
- add support for RHT_HVMS sent to hostX
7) ssh config
- adjust to default log in as kiosk on hostX
8) named
- allow hostX to query foundation0
9) rht-pushkernelargs
- shift rht-add-kernel-args to /usr/local/sbin to prevent student use
10) redhat-survey
- redhat-survey has been updated
===========================================================================
On August 13, 2014: Update to Foundation layer
Hi folks,
Before I get too many of these inquiries, yes, there was a *tiny* update
to the Foundation layer last night producing:
What you may notice is that only *one* artifact changed:

foundation0-config-7.0-1.r25722.x86_64.rpm.
So what did Rob and George mess with.
1) Update to rht-verify-f0 to support some "future" courses and to

additionally "rpmverify" the foundation0-<type> package.
2) Some changes to DNS to better support "reverse lookups". Of course this
also will require changes to the classroom VM which will be made available
at some future date (those changes are being field tested by the CL210v5
instructors). And, before you ask, NO, you cannot use the CL210 classroom
VM for RHCE classes - completely different configurations - hence
different filenames.
This newer Foundation is *required* for CL210v5 and *optional, but

recommended* for RHCE.
The pending changes to the classroom VM include:

1) Fixing DNS reverse lookups
2) Fixing communication between students (or more likely, between
instructor and students) - no more sometimes rejected ssh, unless you ping
first
These are not *urgent* fixes to the classroom VM which is why we are
currently waiting to batch up some more changes, so keep those Jira
tickets coming....
--Rob
===========================================================================
On July 24, 2014: Updated bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
So, it's that time of week again, but this time we are doing it on
Thursday for those that did not like a late Friday announcement.... This
is also a much shorter but perhaps more important announcement.... And,
again, just because we have released some updated bits does not preclude
you from sticking with your "happy" bits on Monday if you do not feel you
can adequately test these new bits for yourself before then.
Thanks to the efforts, testing and time comparisons from Artur, we have
tested ourselves the nobarrier option, incorporated it in to this release
and found install times cut in half for Monday morning!!
What release is that Gracie?
What about the courses?
Remember we separated the layers so we can release changes independently

and we do not, for the moment, have any updates for the virtual layer.
So faster install times, Gracie, but there must be more?
Of course George, we have taken several suggestions from the field to help
make the instructor experience better. Since the Download Manager from the
TQMs and IT has not arrived yet, we bit the bullet and added three new
verbs to the rht-usb tool: lsartifacts, remove, and rmobsoletes, all to
help manage the cache directory. And, George added a nice summary line to
the rht-verify-f0 so that Gracie doesn't need to scroll up to see if
everything PASSED....
So, Gracie, is there anything that is going to catch the instructors off
guard on this one?
Yes, George, Phil Sweaney made two suggestions that require the
instructors to pay attention:
1) He convinced us to remove the ".py" on the end of the rht-usb script
file name.
2) He was having problems with the USB stick when using a RHEL VM to
manage it, which was fixed by forcing the USB mount with the "sync"
option. While it appears to make the stick slower it is more a question of
"when" you wait. With sync we wait throughout the writes. With the old
async, we sat there a *long* time when the USB stick is unmounted.
Well, before it becomes Friday in our time zone, say good night Gracie!
Good night Gracie!
Here's the changelog:
Foundation Layer Changes:
1) rht-usb
- remove .py extension from tool (thank Phil Sweaney)
- embed correct version in to tool (thank Pete Davis)
- force USB to use "sync" mount option to improve compatibility we
hope.... though it "seems" slower. (thank Phil Sweaney)
- change checkartifact to only md5sum once when in multiple manifests
(thank Greg Hosler)
- change processing of os.listdir to be sorted (list, usblist,
listartifacts) (thank Susan Lauber)
- be aware of rpm re-installation and just note it, not an error - still
not handling downgrades (thank Phil Sweaney)
- attempt to handle hard link recreation (happens on upgrades of same
course manifest) (thank Rob)
- help now gracefully handles bad verb as if it was not typed (thank Phil
Sweaney)
- add verb "lsartifacts" to identify artifacts in cache that are
unreferenced (thank Peter Tselios)
- add verb "remove" to delete a manifest (and unique artifacts) from cache
(thank Peter Tselios)
- add verb "rmobsoletes" to delete orphaned artifacts from cache (thank
Peter Tselios)
- add nobarrier for installation, but disable in fstab before reboot
(thank Artur Szymczak)
3) ssh config
- tweak hostnames for proper username usage on OpenStack course VMs (thank
Forrest Taylor)
4) Documentation
- update docs with new options mentioned above
- add some troubleshooting information from the field
5) rht-vmctl
- add tab completion (thank George Hacker)
6) rht-verify-f0
- displays a summary now (thank George Hacker)
===========================================================================
Hello everyone,
So, it's that time of week again, an announcement from George and I that
there are new bits on Instructor Central for the RHEL 7 instructors.
Well, first, you may have noticed that earlier today the interface on
Instructor Central changed a little. When you go to download a course
manifest, it only shows you the "BEST" course manifest for each course,
though there is a little pull down icon on the left to get to the old
ones if need be.
That should make it easier to find the manifest that our TQMs want us
using! Ah, but Gracie, you said there were new bits available?
Of course George. The new manifests are:

RH124-RHEL70-1.r24927-ILT-7-en_US.icmf
But Gracie, there is a new course in that list....
Good eye George! And, who knows? There might be another one before your
instructor friends even read this! George, before you give them the
changelog from the previous release, is there anything "really big" that
they should know?
Gracie, we've been hard at work creating some new "verbs" to rht-usb.py
and some new utilities! I think folks will want to check out "rht-usb.py
usbmkboot", but I'll warn you, there are a bunch of caveats to that one,
and given some of the field reports about the strangeness of Ubuntu, I
would only want to try that one on a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora system (and make
sure I have a backup). A lot of delicate handling with that one.... But we
also have a new rht-vmsetkeyboard utility and some instructions that might
help instructors automate the selection of non-US keyboards for the VMs
instead of making students type in that long sed command multiple times!
Be aware that rht-verify-classroom is a lot more chatty than it used to be
(much like the change to rht-verify-f0 in the last release). Lastly, we
have added an rht-config-capacity tool for those rare TQM approved
instances of running a class with more than 20 students....
Wow, George, you've been busy! As always, please send bug reports (with
patches even) to Jira under the appropriate project. Deatils and logs are
good to send us as described in ClassroomTroubleshooting.txt.
Say good night Gracie!
Good night Gracie!
Here's the changelog:
1) rht-usb.py
- add f0validate verb to check foundation0
- add usbverify verb to selectively check manifests on USB
- add some blank lines to output of verify/validate verbs to make more
readable (Thanks Greg!)
- stop python spew when usb commands are executed but no device plugged in
- add usbmkboot - see ClassPrep.txt for details
- usbvalidate now immediately punts when missing extracted RHCIfoundation
files
- log /proc/cmdline directly to rht-ks-pre.log
- add RHT_VM0 to /etc/rht for infrastructure VMs on f0 (remove from
RHT_VMS)
3) rht-verify-f0
- add --validate option for more involved troubleshooting
4) Docs
- ClassroomTroubleshooting.txt - more detailed X/video tips thanks to
Janez Trenz
- ClassroomSetup.txt - usage of rht-vmsetkeyboard
- ClassPrep.txt - usage of rht-usb.py usbmkboot and restriction to RH
distributions
5) rht-vmctl
- add support for save/restore/fullreset of classroom
- have remove prompt for confirmation and shift rht-clearcourse to use -q
- add support for RHT_VM0
6) rht-{set,push}course
7) rht-vmicons
8) rht-vmsetkeyboard
- new utility on foundationX to loop through VMs to change their keyboard
9) foundation-config.rpm
- add missing dependency on pexpect
RHCE Curriculum VM Layer Changes:
1) Grading script fixes/improvements

2) rht-verify-classroom
- checks more things like rht-verify-f0
3) rht-config-capacity
- new utility to bump up max student count from 20
4) rhttool.shlib
- adjust method of determining X
5) rc.local
- adjust RHT_ROLE and add RHT_ENROLLMENT to desktopX/serverX
===========================================================================
Hello everyone,
So a couple of weeks of live classes having been running in North America

along with pilots of RH254 and RH299. We're getting close to having all
five classes released. In the meantime, thanks to the feedback from this
field, we have been working on making some adjustments to the both the
foundation and virtual layers. Consequently, there are new versions on
Instructor Central released a few moments ago. Be aware that I have left
the "previous" release active on Instructor Central though we encourage
people to obtain this latest one (for, example, the foundation0-rhce
package is now back in sync for all three released courses). The official
relelased list is now:
Here is a list of changes when compared to the previous release:
1) Remember users do not need root on foundation systems. Users need to

use the tools we supply to manage/access their VMs. There has been some
confusion with students using sudo on fX to perform an exercise on the
wrong system. That "hole" has been closed.
- kiosk user no longer a member of wheel group
- kiosk user can only run rht-vmctl on fX systems (which internally uses
sudo to do privileged things)
2) rht-usb.py:
- fix initial usbformat (no longer need to run twice to format)
- fully extracting rhci-foundation.iso to USB to avoid using CD for
anything other than "bootstrap"
- new verb "verifyquick" - see Appendix of ClassPrep.txt for details
- stop using /mnt for temporary mountpoint of temp-dvd - moved to /tmp -
old dudes rock!
- clean up /tmp/tmpXXXXXX directories that we create when done - thanks
Gary for making me revisit this!
- fixed usbvalidate opening of RHCIfoundation manifest to check /boot
3) rht-showstate:
- new tool on f0 to "quickly" show the status of all the fX systems and
their VMs
- this uses a new verb in rht-vmctl called "status"
4) Desktop icons will now start the VM if it is not running

- this is for the icons *only*, it does not affect "rht-vmctl view
desktop" which will produce an error if the VM is not running
- real problem was that the desktop icon's error message was not visible
5) Modified rht-vmctl start to display an error message when

virtualization is off in BIOS
6) rht-verify-f0 now shows *more* useful information
7) rht-pushcourse will now additionally push RHT_VMTREE variable (to

support other "platforms")
8) Split out ClassroomSetup.txt into three files:

- ClassroomSetup.txt contains the Monday morning activities
- ClassroomTroubleshooting.txt contains hopefully helpful hints when
things go wonky
- ClassroomReset.txt contains instructions on destroying or
"re-purposing" the room
- Added some DHCP information to ClassroomSetup and
ClassroomTroubleshooting
- Added keyboard discussion to ClassroomTroubleshooting
9) Added rht-clearcourse for "resetting" a room to shift to a new course

- see ClassroomReset.txt for details on use
- we are only cleaning out the VM layer
- cruft from students left on their fX will remain (like Firefox cache)
- most useful for mid-week transitions (same students), not necessarily
over the weekend
10) Added rht-pushkernelargs - see ClassroomTroubleshooting.txt for

details
As an FYI, we are beginning to experiment with making the USB "bootable",

but do not have anything ready for release yet. The goal is to eliminate
the requirement for booting from a CD (though that will continue to be
offered as an option).
RHCE Curriculum VM Layer Changes:
1) Grading scripts updated to support later classes and fix reported

issues in earlier classes
2) Added ServerAlias for short name "content"

- content.example.com is a VirtualHost on classroom.example.com with a
DocumentRoot of /content
- classroom.example.com has a DocumentRoot of /var/www/html which contains
a symbolic link of content pointing at /content
- /content contains the static universal across all courses
- other directories under /var/www/html contain "built" files
created/adjusted by classroom.
3) On classroom, rht-verify-classroom and rht-config-nat no longer require

being root and have been moved to /usr/local/bin
4) Fixed "upgrade" scenario if wanting to upgrade the foundation0-rhce

package mid-class (needed for pilot, but should be a *very* unusual
scenario).
5) Be explicit about what version of redhat-survey needs to be installed

on first boot of classroom
- this happens automatically when classroom boots for the first time
(through rc.local)
6) Synchronized some VM build elements back from VT/ROL in to ILT images
Have at it folks!
--Rob
===========================================================================
On June 12, 2014: Divergence of Manifests
Congratulations to Kelwin for being the first to notice and ask me!
Yes, if you download all three released courses, RH124, RH134, and RH199,
you will find that you will be maintaining 2 versions of the
foundation0-rhce package.
Some background on that particular package: it contains the additional

packages (including errata) and lab/grading scripts that are added to the
/content tree. This package is common to all the RHCE classes (RH124,
RH134, RH199, RH254 and RH299). It will be seeing a fair amount of churn
until we finish releasing all of the classes.
When we released RH124, the scripts used by RH124 were finished and
packaged into version 7.0-1.r24164. Since that release, some scripts were
added/fixed so we snapped for the RH134/199 releases at version
7.0-1.r24193. So, yes, the three manifests refer to two foundation0-rhce
packages.
But, no worries. When you install a particular course manifest, it

explicitly installs just the files specified in that one manifest. So,
when you install rh124, it will install version 7.0-1.r24164 of
foundation0-rhce.
So, what's going to happen over the next several weeks?
First, having just released RH124, we didn't want to concern any of the
instructors preparing for their first teach next week by churning and
releasing a "new" manifest for that course. We do plan to re-synchronize
the five courses later on once the churn to foundation0-rhce slows down.
My "educated guess" is that we will aim for the next re-sync with the GA
release of RH254.... :-)
--Rob
===========================================================================
On June 10, 2014: Release bits on Instructor Central
Hello everyone,
So, as most of you saw, Red Hat announced and delivered Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7 earlier today. Following that announcement, Ralph Rodriguez gave
all of us an outline for the roll out of RHEL 7 based curricula, beginning
with the RHCE level curricula.
As many of you have seen (and already begun to work with), we have
introduced a new web application from which you will obtain your RHEL7
based classroom materials called Instructor Central. In this first release
of Instructor Central, you will see a list of "manifests" of "artifacts"
that need to be downloaded to a cache directory on your local Linux based
workstation/laptop/virtual machine. Please keep an eye on the fact that
some artifacts will exist in multiple manifests and you DO NOT need to
re-download an artifact if you already have a good copy in your local
cache directory.
You will start with the manifest entitled RHCIfoundation, then add one or
more course manifests. Follow the directions found in ClassPrep-*.txt for
creating your cache directory, verifying the artifacts that you have
downloaded, creating boot media, creating your USB media, and validating
that USB media. You will then follow the generic ClassroomSetup-*.txt
instructions for what to do on a Monday morning. But, of course, you all
have already been through these steps and this is just a reminder of the
process.
This afternoon George, Bowe and I have updated some of the previous files
for those preparing for their first RHEL 7 RH124 class. These updated
files include the previously missing "kernel update" and the adjustment to
the "grading script" to evaluate the kernel update correctly (along with
some updates applicable to the later classes).
So, available on Instructor Central are three new manifests:
RHCIfoundation-RHEL70-1.r24083-ILT-7-en_US.icmf (release)
RH124-RHEL70-1.r24164-ILT-7-en_US.icmf (release)
RH134-RHEL70-0.r24164-ILT-7-en_US.icmf (pre-release)
**** PLEASE READ THIS PART ****

One significant change between these manifests and their immediate
predecessors is that the name of the RHEL 7 DVD now matches the one used
by CDN/RHN (rhel-server-7.0-x86_64-dvd.iso). If you had previously
downloaded RHEL-7.0-20140507.0-Server-x86_64-dvd1.iso, you are the lucky
recipient of already having the correct iso. It just has the *wrong name*.
You can go to your cache directory and simply rename the file to
rhel-server-7.0-x86_64-dvd.iso. Remember from ClassPrep.txt that you can
run "sudo ./rht-usb-*.py verify all" to make sure the artifacts for the
newly downloaded manifests match and have a correct "checksum". If the
checksums do not report "Good", then you need to re-download the artifact.
If you have been keeping up with us, all you should need to download is
just over 100MB of content when comparing these manifests to their
immediate predecessors released this past weekend.
**** END OF ME TRYING TO SAVE YOU TIME ****
Lastly, it might be best to re-do your "sudo ./rht-usb-*.py usbformat

/dev/sdh1" to make sure you do not have any left over artifacts. I am just
concerned that you do not end up with two RHEL 7 iso files in
rhel7.0/x86_64/isos/ on the USB media. Alternatively, using usbadd to
"update/replace" all of the manifests will also work as long as you
update/replace ALL of the manifests on the USB media to the above versions
before trying to use it.
Lastly, to simplify things like the above "verify all", I would recommend
that you manually delete any "old" .icmf files from your cache directory.
Our IT Tower will be delivering a cache management tool (and downloader)
later in the year that will make cleaning up your cache directory easier,
but at least deleting the old manifest files will make things a little
more sane for you.
--Rob
PS. Again if you are having difficulties with downloading the files
repeatedly from Instructor Central, please search through the previous
messages to get the list of information needed and report the problem to
your TQM. Unfortunately the curriculum team cannot do much with that
infrastructure piece.

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===========================================================================

On October 31, 2018: New Foundation Release - Survey fix

On September 25, 2018: New Foundation Release - Additional dualboot fix

Specifically, the autogeneration of the other operating system was not

Filesystems have been a changing target for Fedora 28 where the

We also updated rht-pushdekstop to more easily support adding the

WARNING: We have made a significant change to how manifests get deployed

EFI is here as a Tech Preview. We have added EFI boot/installation support

We have added a new utility on foundation0 to make it easier to supply

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On February 6, 2018: New Foundation Release - CL310 Release

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On November 15, 2017: New Foundation Release - welcome RHEL 7.4

This release is mostly about adding RHEL 7.4 as a supported version

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On July 12, 2017: New Foundation Release - more cleanup

This release is mostly about cleanup. Cleanup of code and features.

The keywords "all" and "everything" as used by rht-vmctl needed to be

A new utility has been introduced called rht-movebr0. The purpose is to

f0$ rht-movebr0 --status

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On April 26, 2017: New Foundation Release - cleanup

This release is mostly about cleanup. Cleanup of code and features.

One additional change in behavior: rht-external now uses prefix when

Two new utilities: rht-pushdesktop and rht-collectsurvey are used to

f0$ rht-pushdesktop all|# roster|survey

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On November 30, 2016: New Foundation Release - official 7.3 support

With the release of RHEL 7.3 on November 3, we are offering a new

This release includes a newer redhat-survey package that unifies the

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On July 27, 2016: New Foundation Release - first v5

Another larger update is the replacement of rht-config-nat on classroom

Couple of interesting changes/enhancements:

All UCF updates are expected to be backward-compatible, so updating to

On November 24, 2015: New Foundation Release - introducing 7.2

So after being quiet for so long, here we go again.

Some miscommunication between yours truly and the certification team

Also fixed was the rht-setcourse bug reported on contractor-list over

Detailed list of changes:

On November 4, 2015: New Foundation Release - first v4

The other major feature in this release is more to help me as I prepare

**** PLEASE READ THIS PART ****

The other significant Monday morning change is that rht-pushcourse now

Please read the new (and improved?) ClassroomSetup.txt file carefully.

As always, we love those Jira reports!

Detailed list of changes:

On June 4, 2015: New Foundation Release

So, what am I introducing?

So, what can I announce with these updates?

On March 12, 2015: Updated foundation bits on Instructor Central

I just finished uploading a new pretty significant update to the

One of the fundamental goals of the new Universal Classroom Foundation

So, today, I announce the release of two new RHCIfoundation manifests:

So, what am I introducing?

So, what is "new" with these updates?

1. rht-usb adds the verbs size, usbsizeadd, and usbsizeremove to display

2. foundationX will import the curriculum rpm gpg key by default.

PLEASE READ THIS PART

What you may notice is that only one artifact changed:

This newer Foundation is required for CL210v5 and *optional, but