Salting Spacewalk and SenseHat …

Most pull requests on GitHub aren’t that newsworthy, but there are two that were accepted into the Salt project recently that I think you should be aware of. Both of them started as part of a SUSE Hack Week effort.

Let’s begin with the “fun one”: With the inclusion of the execution module and beacon for the SenseHat, a popular Raspberry Pi extension module that started off as part of the Astro Pi project that brought the Raspberry Pi to the International Space Station, you can now use Salt to light up the 8×8 LED matrix on the SenseHat, display messages on it, and read out its sensors (for example temperature and humidity).

The beacon can even inform you automatically via Salt’s event bus if the Pi gets too hot! If you haven’t seen it in action, here’s the link to a YouTube video of the prototype implementation.

The second one is less fancy, but very useful to all of you who need to manage SUSE Manager deployments, from just a proof of concept to large-scale infrastructure:

The newly extended Spacewalk runner module builds on an earlier submission by Nitin Madhok, who also presented at the openSUSE conference earlier this year.

It allows you to remote-control a SUSE Manager or Spacewalk server through its XML-RPC API. One of the main use cases I see is to enable users to configure a freshly installed SUSE Manager server from a single YAML configuration file:

Add all your initial users, system groups, activation keys etc. with the run of one Salt orchestration script! Of course it could also be leveraged to trigger interactions with SUSE Manager as part of a larger orchestration scenario.

Interestingly enough, because quite a few of SUSE Manager’s XML-RPC API calls now use Salt behind the scenes, this runner, in a way, allows Salt to call itself through SUSE Manager.

If you haven’t realized yet: There even is a connection between the two projects: Maybe the guys on the International Space Station can now take both the Raspberry Pi and SUSE Manager on a spacewalk. 🙂

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from Nuremberg, where night has fallen, but developers are still (out)standing.