Stackers Network Digest — October 18, 2025

The Big Picture

This was a bridge week between the OpenInfra Summit Europe in Paris-Saclay and the virtual PTG (Oct 27–31). With most of the community traveling or heads-down on operations, the list skewed heavily toward hands-on troubleshooting — NUMA scheduling on Caracal, OVN live-migration outages, Glance image uploads — punctuated by PTG scheduling and a sharp security-SIG reminder spun off a beginner's question about how to set instance passwords. R-24 to 2026.1 Gazpacho.

Security

Don't put passwords in instance metadata. A user's practical question about setting an admin password at server create became a security-SIG teaching moment when Sean Mooney and Jeremy Stanley chimed in pointing at OSSN-0074 and the server password API. The short version: the --password flag and the metadata-stored server password pattern are footguns; passwords end up readable in instance metadata. Use cloud-init / SSH keys instead. Operator-facing documentation for this remains thin, and the thread is worth bookmarking.

Heads Up / Action Needed

ovn-bgp-agent reviews stuck. Mohammed Naser flagged a backlog: trivial bugfix backports (947151, 947152, 947153) plus a bigger driver-ecosystem rework (944300, 937457) have sat for months — the latter two now in merge conflict. VEXXHOST is running these downstream; they'd like upstream to catch up before that becomes the norm.

Horizon: Nova live-migration microversion support — patch 961099 has sat almost a month with no review; both Dong Ma and Mohammed Naser asked the Horizon team to take a look.

Neutron drivers + CI meetings cancelled for the next two weeks (no topics + PTG). Brian Haley reminded everyone to keep adding to the Neutron PTG etherpad and to update or review open specs.

Development & Technical Decisions

Glance ISO uploads broken under Epoxy with "Multiple formats detected: iso,gpt". Eugen Block hit HTTP 415 uploading openSUSE Leap and Ubuntu ISOs after the Epoxy upgrade — glance.common.exception.InvalidImageData: Multiple formats detected: iso,gpt. Workaround: [image_format] require_image_format_match = false. The check landed with the glance-as-defender work. Tracked at bug 2127789; raw images upload fine. Operators upgrading to Epoxy should expect this.

openstacksdk compute query: host vs compute_host. Winicius Allan flagged a docs-vs-API inconsistency when filtering servers by compute host. Discussion in bug 2101016.

Skyline core nomination from Reet Srivastava. Goutham Pacha Ravi welcomed the self-nomination (rare in OpenStack) but noted that core status is a maintainer decision: build review history first, organize a PTG discussion to align the existing maintainers, then revisit. The Skyline team is short on bandwidth, so this is a genuine opportunity for the project.

Nova persistent PXE boot for VMs. Eugen Block (different thread, same operator) asked whether there's a path to persistent PXE-boot mode for VMs managed by Uyuni — currently only achievable by hand-editing libvirt XML, which doesn't persist. Sean Mooney's separate 11-message Nova/Neutron thread on persistent PXE is worth tracking through the PTG.

Yubikey SSH key support in keypairs. Melanie Witt opened the discussion; it overlaps with the password-in-metadata concerns and the broader push toward key-based authentication.

Operator Notes

NUMA scheduling on Caracal at scale. Two operators reported the same Nova issue — Brijesh Mishra and Vish Mudemela. Without hw:numa_nodes=2, Nova places everything on a single socket leaving the other(s) underutilized. With the property set, scheduling spreads vCPU/memory across both sockets but they observe 20–30% memory performance degradation, and the scheduler always spreads even when one socket has headroom. The ask is essentially conditional NUMA placement — single-node when capacity permits, dual-node otherwise. No upstream fix on the table; expect this to come up at the Nova PTG.

OVN live-migration ≥10s switchover on Wallaby. Kamil Madac sees 10–40s connectivity loss on provider networks during live-migrate on a Wallaby TripleO deployment, but not on a 2024.2 Kolla-Ansible one. OVN multi-chassis port bindings were not implemented in Wallaby, which is the likely root cause; operators on older releases should validate before relying on live migrate as a maintenance tool.

Octavia amphora health-check failures on 2023.1 — "no route to host" / timeout errors reported by Felix Sanz, looking for someone who's resolved the same pattern.

Ceph Jaeger tracing limited to OSD only — operator continued asking for guidance on adopting ceph/ceph PR 59365 (MON/MGR/RGW tracers) ahead of a merge.

PTG Scheduling

PTG planning continued. Iury Gregory proposed Wednesday slots for Ironic cross-projects with Nova (Graphical Console follow-up) and Nova+Cinder (boot from NVMe-over-TCP), with the Ironic/Neutron cross-project session targeting 15:30 or 16:00 UTC.

Governance & Community

TC weekly summary (R-24). Governance changes marking Venus and Vitrage inactive are in progress. Monasca's retirement is on hold waiting for a response from a potential new maintainer. The TC is finalizing a new APAC-friendly meeting slot (monthly or bi-weekly cadence). TC liaisons are being refreshed for Freezer, Oslo, Release Management, and Requirements — volunteers welcome. A meet-and-greet with the TC at OpenInfra Summit Europe was scheduled for Sunday October 19 17:05 UTC, Becquerel room.

Neutron bug deputy report (Oct 6–12) — High-priority items concentrated in VPNaaS (Libreswan with AEAD ciphers, ovn-vpn-agent service deletion, ipsec.conf config drift), plus OVN CI jobs broken against Ironic (now fixed). Multiple patches proposed; see the report for tracking links.