OpenSCAP is a standardized compliance solution for Linux. It is comprised of policies (NIST, STIG, etc) and tooling (oscap, scap-workbench) that allow you to scan and evaluate Linux hosts in order to validate their compliance with industry defined standards.
In addition to providing industry standard compliance rules, OpenSCAP also allows administrators to create custom compliance standards using the scap-workbench.
Administrators can then generate remediation files in bash, ansible or puppet.
Let’s get familiar with OpenSCAP below.
Getting Started
Below is an overview of the “Getting Started” workflow. In this workflow we are gonna run through a very simple use-case, scanning your local Fedora workstation.
Install
Choose Policy
Modify/Adjust
Scan
Remediate
In the sections below we will walk through each of these steps in detail.
Red Hat Satellite consists of a number of running services. Restarting each service manually can be painful. Luckily you can use the commands below to easily restart all services.
List Services
Run the command below to view a list of all Satellite services that are started at boot.
# katello-service list
Redirecting to ‘foreman-maintain service’
Running Service List
========================================================================
List applicable services:
dynflowd.service enabled
foreman-proxy.service enabled
httpd.service enabled
postgresql.service enabled
pulp_celerybeat.service enabled
pulp_resource_manager.service enabled
pulp_streamer.service enabled
pulp_workers.service enabled
puppetserver.service enabled
qdrouterd.service enabled
qpidd.service enabled
rh-mongodb34-mongod.service enabled
smart_proxy_dynflow_core.service enabled
squid.service enabled
tomcat.service enabled
All services listed [OK]
Check Service Status
The command below will check the status of all Satellite services. The output is similar to running a systemctl status on all Satellite specific services. The output can be quite verbose.
# katello-service status
Stop Services
Use the command below to stop all Satellite services.
# katello-service stop
Start Services
Use the command below to start all Satellite services.
# katello-service start
Restart Services
The command below will restart all Satellite services.
When spawning a virtual machine in RHV without the guest agent, a warning will appear as an exclamation mark in RHV.
Register with Satellite
You can skip this step if your guest is already registered
In order to install the guest agent, I must first register the virtual machine with my local satellite. If not using a local satellite server, you can register with RHN.
First we need to grab the katello rpm from satellite – an insecure satellite server in this case as we are using a self-signed cert.
In this post I will review the process of creating Content Views (CV), Composite Content Views (CCV), publishing each view, and creating lifecycles.
Note that in this post we are working with Red Hat Satellite 6.4, in which there was a major overhaul of the WebUI. You may have noticed that all menus are now situated on in a pane on the left, rather than at the top of each page.
Sync Plans
A sync plan is a constant, scheduled synchronization of updates of a Red Hat Satellite repository and the source repositories. I suggest syncing either daily or weekly in order to minimize the deltas between each sync. When you sync more often, the amount of change between syncs is less and therefore should complete faster than a monthly sync.
Note that this step assumes that you have already setup the correct repositories for RHEL and Red Hat OpenStack. A list of required repositories can be found in the Red Hat OpenStack Director Installation and Usage Guide.
Navigate to Content > Sync Plans
Here we create a daily sync plan for RHEL 7.
We now add RHEL 7 as the product.
Now we need to create a daily sync plan for Red Hat OpenStack.
Note: you might need to create a sync plan for Ceph as well. Ensure all plans sync at the same interval.
Create a Content View
Now we need to create our content views. We will create one for RHEL, and one for OSP. If you are using ceph, you will need to create a content view for it as well.
In this post I will document the steps that I am using to create a fully virtualized OSP 10 environment in my lab. The undercloud node is a VM, as well as the overcloud nodes. We will configure libvirt so that ironic has the ability to boot and shutdown the VMs on the underlying hypervisor via Ironic.
Add the stack user on your hypervisor. In this case my hypervisor’s hostname is virt01, however we will refer to it as hypervisor for clarity.
Now attempt to libvirt as stack via a remote session. Here we are just connecting back to the localhost, virt01. In the example below, 10.1.99.112 is the ip of the hypervisor. The undercloud has an ip of 10.1.99.10
[simterm]undercloud# virsh –connect qemu+ssh://stack@10.1.99.112/system list –all
[/simterm]
Now ssh as stack to your undercloud vm
Copy stack’s public key to your hypervisor (virt01 in this case). In the command below you will replace the ip address shown with the ip that your undercloud vm will use to connect to libvirt on the hypervisor
Now we need to create a few Virtual Machines. Specifically I am building an environment with 5 virtual machines to run virtualized Red Hat Openstack 13. My overcloud will consist of 2 computes and three controller nodes
You should end up with the following virtual machines
[simterm]hypervisor# virsh list –all
Id Name State
—————————————————-
1 undercloud running
– overcloud-node1 shut off
– overcloud-node2 shut off
– overcloud-node3 shut off
– overcloud-node4 shut off
– overcloud-node5 shut off
[/simterm]
Back on the undercloud we use the command below to grab the provisioning network mac address from each virtual machine running on the hypervisor. We could run this command locally on the hypervisor, but since we need the mac addresses for ironic on the undercloud, we will run it here.
[simterm]undercloud$ for i in {1..5}; do virsh -c qemu+ssh://stack@10.1.99.112/system domiflist overcloud-node$i | awk ‘$3 == “provisioning” {print $5}’; done> /tmp/nodes.txt
[/simterm]
Now we use our temp file above to populate the instackenv.json that we will import into ironic. See gist below
At this point we are ready to import our nodes via Ironic.
Note that I do not claim to be the original author of the steps documented above, rather I wanted to ensure that I could easily consume these steps in the future.
Also, I look forward to experimenting with the vbmc ironic driver and might stop using pxe_ssh altogether.
I have recently purchased 3 Dell servers, and put myself to task to build out a new lab. My old lab was in desperate need of updating as I had long past the time when 48GB of memory per node was sufficient. The cost of memory, old or new was not even closely in line with cheap server grade CPUs that were perfect for lab servers. Today you can buy a used E7540, a low power, 12 core (HT enabled) Xeon for less than $30 (USD) from a reputable retailer. Cram two of these into an 11 gen Dell and you are in business.
So, three new (to me) Dell rackmounts, deployed as virtualization servers, and I want a simple way to view performance stats in a nice clean single pain of glass. I am not in any way shape or form looking to build fancy dashboard and setup any sort of historical monitoring. I just want to know where the performance hot spots are when my environment seems to be running slowly.
I installed Cockpit before on a laptop or two and thought it might foot the bill, especially since you could use one dashboard for multiple nodes.
So here we are going to deploy Cockpit on all three nodes, on each the steps are the same.
You can use the steps below if you need to change managed IP resources, for example, if you need to re-IP your RHEL OSP Overcloud endpoints.
In this example, we are changing a managed VIP from one IP to another.
First, we get a good look at the resource that we want to delete. Here we are going to delete the resource ip-99.239.203.25. This resource starts the VIP, 99.239.203.25.
