NEWS.md

Razor Server Release Notes

0.13.0 - 2014-01-21

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

Public API changes

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

0.12.0 - 2014-01-03

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

Public API changes

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

SVC (node/server) API

• add store_metadata_url helper

Tag language

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

Other

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

0.11.0 - 2013-11-26

Public API changes

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

Installers

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

Node/server API changes

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

Configuration

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

Other

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

0.10.0 - 2013-09-18

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