Remotely checking out from git using ssh key forwarding.

Much of my work is done on machines that are only on load to me, not permanently assigned. Thus, I need to be able to provision them quickly and with a minimum of fuss. One action I routinely need to do is to check code out of a git server, such as gitlab.com. We use ssh keys to authenticate to gitlab. I need a way to do this securely when working on a remote machine. Here’s what I have found

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Print the line after a match using AWK

We have an internal system for allocating hardware to developers on a short term basis. While the software does have a web API, it is not enabled by default, nor in our deployment. Thus, we end up caching a local copy of the data about the machine. The machine names are a glom of architecture, and location. So I make a file with the name of the machine, and a symlink to the one I am currently using.

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XPath for libvirt external snapshop path

The following xmllint XPath query will pull out the name of the backing file for a VM named fedora-server-36 and an external snapshot named fedora-36-post-install,

virsh snapshot-dumpxml fedora-server-36 fedora-server-36-post-install | xmllint --xpath "string(//domainsnapshot/disks/disk[@snapshot='external']/source/@file)" -

The string function extracts the attribute value.

This value can be used in the process of using or deleting the snapshot.

Date format suitable for file names

It is rare that you want to write something without later wanting to be able to read it back. One common way of organizing files that are generated regularly is by time stamp. If you want to add a timestamp to a file name, you can do so using the date command.

In order for the filenames to sort in the right order, you want the name to go from largest unit to smallest.

Here is an example that creates a filename-suitable string formed Year->second. I remove all unnecessary formatting characters.

date --rfc-3339=seconds | sed -E -e 's! |-|:!!g'

The date command reads the current date/time on the local system. –rfc-3339=seconds produces output that looks like this:

$ date --rfc-3339=seconds 
2021-11-03 10:57:14-04:00

In order to keep the regular expression concise inside the sed command, the -E switch tells it to use extended regular expressions, including the alternation character ‘|’ . Thus, the regex ‘ |-|:’ matches a space, a dash, and a colon.

Querying hostnames from beaker

If you have requested a single host from beaker, the following one liner will tell the hostname for it.

bkr job-results   $( bkr job-list  -o $USER  --unfinished | jq -r  ".[]" )   | xpath -q -e string\(/job/recipeSet/recipe/roles/role/system/@value\)

This requires jq and xpath, as well as the beaker command line packages.

For me on Fedora 33 the packages are:

  • perl-XML-XPath-1.44-7.fc33.noarch
  • jq-1.6-5.fc33.x86_64
  • python3-beaker-1.10.0-9.fc33.noarch
  • beaker-redhat-0.2.1-2.fc33eng.noarch
  • beaker-common-28.2-1.fc33.noarch
  • beaker-client-28.2-1.fc33.noarch

Manually Adding SSH Keys to a Cloud Image

Not all of my virtual machines run on OpenStack; I have to run a fair number of virtual machines on my personal workstation via libvirt. However, I like using the cloud versions of RHEL, as they most closely match what I do run in OpenStack. The disconnect is that the Cloud images are designed to accept cloud-init, which pulls the ssh public keys from a metadata web server. Without that, there are no public keys added to the cloud-user account, and the VM is unaccessable. Here is how I add the ssh keys manually.
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