On 10.01.2017 08:09, Ramesh Nachimuthu wrote:

Hi,

We are working with oVirt team to integrate Gluster deployment in cockpit-ovirt plugin. We are using an ansible based tool called gdeploy to do the actual deployment. We have few requirements in cockpit to support this flow in UI.

1. Listing all available storage devices in the system. We would like

to show a list of available free storage devices in the system so that user can pick any of them for gluster deployment. I know cockpit already shows this in the storage section. But we need it in the gluster deployment wizard. Is there an API which we can use to show a similar list in our wizard?.

Yes, there's a "Storaged" API that we use to list the devices. Marius would be the one to ping (mvollmer on #cockpit FreeNode IRC) for some example code on how to list the devices with a bit of Javascript.

https://github.com/storaged-project/storaged/

2. Setting up password less SSH to communicate with other nodes.

Ansible needs password less SSH to access other nodes. Is there way to setup this through cockpit?.

So you'd want to:

1. set up the authorized_keys files on the target systems with the appropriate keys 2. gather the host keys into the /etc/ssh/known_hosts on the Ansible machine.

Is that correct?

Most people working on this want to write a script or tool that's usable without the UI ... and then drive that script from the UI. This is so that the same workflow is usable both with and without a UI.

However, if you want to implement these things via UI javascript code, you can:

Get known hosts:

* Use the "host" option to connect to alternate systems:

http://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/cockpit-channels.html#cockpit-channe...

* Use the "host-key" option (undocumented) to force retrieval of the host key and receive it in the "close" message on the channel

Set up authorized_keys:

* Use a "user" and "password" option in a channel to set a password for just the first connection to the "host" (undocumented)

* Use cockpit.file() to write an appropriate authorized_keys file http://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/cockpit-file.html

On the accounts page there is code that sets up authorized SSH keys for various accounts on various systems. See the pkg/users/authorized-keys.js file.

As noted some of this is documented only internally here:

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/blob/master/doc/protocol.md

So your best bet is to talk with us on #cockpit on IRC on Freenode and we can work on this together.

But again, think about whether you want people to also be able to perform this task without the UI. If so a putting together a script callable from both the UI and the command line is your best bet.

3. Task Runner Is there a way to create long running tasks and track

them through cockpit UI?. To me more specific, in our case, whole gluster deployment take long time like more than hour when we have to install more package. So instead of keeping the user waiting and watching the wizard, we would like to close the wizard and create a task and show it some where in the UI(Top right corner?). When user wants to see the status, he can click and open the task and see the status. We can also show a notification when it completes.

This is an interesting topic.

We do have long running tasks, such as formatting disks or rebuilding RAIDs. We haven't yet propagated these to the top level display in the notification bar.

But lets take one step back. When implementing such a feature you'd want to be sure that if the user disconnects and reconnects to Cockpit the task still continues.

The long running tasks we have today (RAID rebuilding) are managed by a system component, and if the user disconnects and reconnects to Cockpit they see the task continuing its state periodically updated.

So that's the first step. The creation of the long running tasks should be done outside of the Cockpit session. Tracking and display is then something we should discuss further.

Does that make sense?

Stef

On 2017-01-10 08:09, Ramesh Nachimuthu wrote:

3. Task Runner Is there a way to create long running tasks and track them through cockpit UI?. To me more specific, in our case, whole gluster deployment take long time like more than hour when we have to install more package. So instead of keeping the user waiting and watching the wizard, we would like to close the wizard and create a task and show it some where in the UI(Top right corner?). When user wants to see the status, he can click and open the task and see the status. We can also show a notification when it completes.

At a minimum, we could show a notification when it's done at least, allowing you to return to the wizard where it shows the progress. There is no patternfly pattern that I'm aware of for this, but I sent a mail to the patternfly-list to check if anyone has a good idea on how to solve it in a good way. https://www.redhat.com/archives/patternfly/2017-January/msg00027.html - Andreas