Version 2.7.1

Upcoming Changes

For details on significant changes in future versions, including feature deprecations and removals which may necessitate updates to existing workshops, see Upcoming changes.

New Features

  • It is now possible to override the cooldown period during which a clickable action cannot be clicked a second time. For many clickable actions this defaults to 3 seconds. For a specific use of a clickable action this can be overridden by setting the cooldown property to the number of seconds. To totally disable clicking on the action a second time you can use the special .INF value. Reloading a page will though again allow the clickable action to be used again. For more information see Overriding action cooldown period.

Features Changed

  • Updated VS Code to version 1.89.1.

  • Versions of kubectl now provided are 1.27-1.30.

  • Reduction of noise in logging for session manager, secrets manager and training portal, with additional more specific logging on what each is doing.

Bugs Fixed

  • If a SecretCopier contained multiple rules and a namespace was matched by a rule which was in a terminating state, the attempt to create the secret in that namespace would fail but not be caught. This meant that any rules which followed that rule were not being applied on that pass and would only be applied some time later after the terminating namespace had finally been deleted. To reduce chance of this occuring, a namespace which is not in the active state will be skipped for matching. Also, any unexpected exception will be explicitly caught and logged rather than being propogated back to the caller.

  • In the most recent Fedora base image used by workshop images the nc package was changed so as to refer to ncat, breaking workshops which were used to the netcat package variant being used. The nc alias has been reverted to use netcat by installing netcat package instead of nc. The ncat package is also installed if want newer variant of nc, but you will need to use the ncat command explicitly.

  • If the cluster DNS server was slow to start resolving DNS names after a new node was started, the session manager could fail on startup and enter crash loop back off state. To remedy both session manager and secrets manager now ensure DNS is able to resolve cluster control plane DNS name before starting up. Startup probes have also been added to these two operators.

  • If the cluster DNS didn’t return a FQDN for the kubernetes.default.svc when queried by that name, the value of the CLUSTER_DOMAIN variable provided to the workshop sessions would be incorrect. This was occuring when Educates was installed into some versions of a virtual cluster. When the returned host name is not a FQDN, then cluster.local will now be used.

  • Workshop session dashboard configuration could not in some cases be overridden from inside of the workshop session by modifying the injected workshop definition. This included not being able to change workshop/terminal layout and whether the dashboard tabs for the editor and console were displayed.

  • The builtin Google Analytics integration was broken due to the TrainingPortal Content Security Policy (CSP) directives declaring outdated sources. The CSPs now allow for *.google-analytics.com and *.googletagmanager.com to be referenced.

  • The CSRF_ALLOWED_ORIGINS setting for the TrainingPortal Django backend was breaking CSRF verification for any TrainingPortal with a custom PORTAL_HOSTNAME configured. We now use the PORTAL_HOSTNAME as allowed CSRF origin and only fall back to the previous implementation if no custom hostname was provided.

  • The workshop title in the dropdown TOC of the workshop instructions was not being populated with the workshop title from the workshop definition when the Hugo renderer was being used.

  • If a workshop session had not been registered by the session manager within 30 seconds of creation and a workshop allocation was pending, the workshop allocation would not progress properly to the allocated state and any request objects associated with the workshop session would not be created. From the perspective of a workshop user the session would still appear to work as the workshop dashboard would still be accessible, but request objects would be missing. Timeout for workshop session registration has been increased to 45 seconds. Because default overall startup timeout is 60 seconds, cannot really increase this much further. Will continue to monitor the situation and see if other changes are needed, including increasing startup timeout to 90 seconds and timeout for workshop session registration with the operator to 60 seconds.

  • If text followed a clickable action and the cascade option was used, the subsequent clickable action would not be automatically triggered. It would work okay if the next clickable action immediately followed the first. This was broken when the cascade mechanim was extended to all clickable actions and not just examiner clickable actions.

  • When using SecretExporter and SecretImporter together, if the source secret did not exist at the time these resources were created, then it would take up to sixty seconds after the source secret was created before it was copied to the target namespace, rather than being copied immediately.

  • When using request.objects and the Kubernetes resource failed client side validation even before attempt to create it on the server, the error was not being caught properly. Details of the error were still captured in the session manager logs, but the details of what failed were not captured in the status message of the WorkshopAllocation resource, nor was the status of the resource updated to “Failed”.

  • The pod security polices (obsolete Kubernetes versions) and security context constraints (OpenShift) resources created for a workshop environment were not being set as being owned by the workshop namespace. This meant these resources were not being deleted automatically when the workshop environment and workshop namespace were deleted.

  • Clicking on links in the dashboard terminal would result in a blank browser window rather than opening the target URL. This had broken when xterm.js had been updated as the implementation used by xterm.js had changed and it no longer works when xterm.js is embedded in an iframe. The implementation used by xterm.js when clicking on links to open the window has been overridden to use the older mechanism.

  • DNS resolution was not working from pods deployed to a virtual cluster. Issue fixed and vcluster updated to 0.18.1, with support for Kubernetes versions 1.27-1.30, defaulting to 1.29.