Considering firmware updates, is there a supported way to install fwupdmgr on elemental provisioned rancher hosts?

Hi, regarding adding extra packages to al already provisioned host there multiple options. The Elemental way would be by providing an upgrade to a new image including such a package, hence building your own derivate image in which you simply install such a package. Then this new image could be consumed by Elemental as an OS upgrade and the upgraded system would include the expected utility.

This is all helpful info - many thanks!

Indeed the image does not include predefined repositories, you should add the repositories of your choice. The

packages

stanza of cloud-init is not supported in Elemental, however you could easily include the

zypper install

call as a

runcmd

item.

I assume pulling the repos from the BCI would be the ideal way to go there? Probably don't want to store SLES credentials in the container image, I'd imagine.

Assuming you have SLES credentials the way to go is by using the https://github.com/SUSE/container-suseconnect Also if you are missing some package into Elemental images I'd also suggest you to open a github issue in github.com/rancher/elemental with a rationale why is this relevant or missing. Feedback directly in github repositories is highly appreciated and it makes it way easier for us to track it and discuss the best approach. I am saying so as probably firmware management tools are a valuable addition to baremetal images and something we can consider in future releases.

I’ve found myself in a similar position to Scott where I’m trying to add the qemu-guest-agent package to my own derivative image (I am otherwise happy with the default Micro for Rancher ISO). I’ve been through a few attempts with no success (I even found an OBS build that does something along those lines https://github.com/rancher/elemental/blob/main/.obs/dockerfile/micro-kvm-os/Dockerfile). My rationale is that I’m using elemental VMs as nodes in a K3S cluster on a Harvester host, and would then like to use the Harvester cloud provider loadbalancer functionality to loadbalance services in the cluster. One of the requirements for this though is that the qemu-guest-agent is installed on the nodes so that Harvester can obtain IPs (https://docs.harvesterhci.io/v1.2/networking/loadbalancer/). Given elemental’s position within Rancher’s OS management and Rancher-Harvester integration, perhaps this would be a good package to include? Happy to raise an issue in GitHub if so.

No problem @acoustic-country-10006, thanks for reaching out. Regarding the missing

qemu-guest-agent

I'd appreciate if you could open an issue and with the motivation you just pointed out. Indeed it looks like a clear candidate for the micro-kvm-os image flavor we are about to release with Micro 6. Regarding the use case you propose and namespace constraints we need to have a closer look.

Excellent, many thanks @sticky-tailor-45974

@acoustic-country-10006 that sounds interesting with harvester <-> elemental hostnames, let us know if you run into any trouble!

Having successfully configured the Harvester cloud provisioned loadbalancer, I can confirm my concern about the VM namespace / cluster namespace matching requirement is not an issue. 👌

Yeah - hostname in Elemental is something I've raised before in my regular custom support channel with SUSE. Having DHCP/static hostname in Elemental saves time when you're debugging which specific bare-metal node is misbehaving.

Hi @miniature-salesclerk-33951! Not sure if this is what you are running into, but if you have already configured hostnames in DHCP for your elemental hosts you can reuse those hostnames for the machines in rancher by setting the machineName in the MachineRegistration like so:

apiVersion: <http://elemental.cattle.io/v1beta1|elemental.cattle.io/v1beta1>
kind: MachineRegistration
metadata:
  name: my-nodes
  namespace: fleet-default
spec:
  machineName: "${System Data/Runtime/Hostname}"

This is also the method I had been using which seems to work fine. I had tried giving Harvester the URL that's at the end of the seed image YAML instead of a file upload, but it seems to validate there's either an .iso/raw/qcow2 on the end as if it were a file extension which there is not so I haven't been able to get this to work

Yep, we recently merged https://github.com/rancher/elemental-operator/pull/682 which hopefully makes it to the next stable release which adds the .iso extension to the seedimage url!

Oh amazing! Thanks for the heads up 🙌