Posts

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Don’t skimp on resources for GHES for demo instances

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been.

The first issue was I gave it a tiny data disk, this was down to me making a typo in my GB to Bytes conversion when specifying the size. Interestingly, the GHES setup does not initially complain but sits on the ‘reloading system services’ stage until it times out. If you check the /setup/config.log you see many Nomad related 500 errors. A reboot of the VM showed the real problem, the log then showed plenty of out-of-disk space messages.

reloading system devices does take a while

The easiest fix was to just start again with a data disk of a reasonable size

I next hit the problems due to my skimping on resources. I am not sure why I chose to limit them, old habits of using systems with scarce resources I guess.

I had only given the VM 10Gb of memory and 1 CPU. The Hyper-V host was not production-grade, but could certainly supply more than that.

  • The lack of at least 14Gb causes the GHES to fail to boot with a nice clear error message
  • The single CPU meant the ‘reloading application services’ step fails, the /setup/config.log shows the message 
Task Group "treelights" (failed to place 1 allocation):
* Resources exhausted on 1 nodes
* Dimension "cpu" exhausted on 1 nodes

As soon as I stopped the VM and provided 14Gb of memory and multiple vCPU to the VM instance and rebooted the setup completed as expected.

So the top tip is to read the GHES systems requirements and actually follow them, even if it is just a test/demo instance.

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Fix for can’t add second outlook.com account to Outlook Desktop – requires non-existent PIN

I was recently trying to set up a copy of the Outlook desktop app with two outlook.com email accounts and hit a strange issue.

I was able to add the first one without any problems, but when I tried to add the second one I got an error message asking for PIN, and most importantly on the same dialog showing the second outlook.com email address.

This is confusing as I know of no way to set a PIN on an outlook.com account.

Turns out it is just a badly designed dialog. It wants the PIN of the currently logged-in user on the Windows PC (made worse in my case as the PIN was not what I thought it was and had to be reset)

Once I had a working PIN for the local user login and entered it when prompted all was OK

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Adding Job Summary support to my GitHub Release Notes Action

A recent addition to GitHub Actions is the ability to create a custom job summary. Using a simple echo command in a script you can write to the job summary

steps:   - name: Adding markdown
  run: echo '### Hello world! :rocket:' >> $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY

Now, this got me thinking. I have a well-used custom release notes extension for Azure DevOps. It has a GitHub Action equivalent, but it does not seem to get as much usage. Would adding support for custom Job Summaries make it more useful?

Well, there was only one way to find out, I added it.

There is now an extra boolean parameter for the action writeToJobSummary. If this is set to true (default is false) the output of the release notes action is written as a custom job summary (as well as still being available as a markdown file as before).

So now using this feature you see something similar to the following. The summary is built using a Handlbars based template.

I hope people find this a useful means to format their release notes using handlebars as opposed to having to build them using a series of echo statements in a script or writing their own custom action.

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Fix for cannot ‘TypeError: Cannot read property’ when Dependabot submits a PR to upgrade a Jest Module

GitHub’s Dependabot is a great tool to help keep your dependencies up to date, and most of the time the PR it generates just merges without a problem. However, sometimes there are issues with other related dependencies.

This was the case with a recent PR to update jest-circus to 28.x. The PR failed with the error

TypeError: Cannot read property ‘enableGlobally’ of undefined at jestAdapter (node_modules/jest-circus/build/legacy-code-todo-rewrite/jestAdapter.js:39:25) at TestScheduler.scheduleTests (node_modules/@jest/core/build/TestScheduler.js:333:13) at runJest (node_modules/@jest/core/build/runJest.js:404:19) at _run10000 (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:320:7) at runCLI (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:173:3)

In the end, the fix was simple, make sure all the other Jest related packages were updated to 28.x versions. Once I did this, using a GitHub Codespace, the PR merged without a problem.

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More examples of using custom variables in Azure DevOps multi-stage YML

I have blogged in the past ( here , here and here) about the complexities and possible areas of confusion with different types of Azure DevOps pipeline variables.

Well here is another example of how to use variables and what can trip you up.

The key in this example is the scope of a variable, whether it is available outside a job and the syntax to access it

Variables local to the Job

So, if you create your variable as shown below

write-host "##vso[task.setvariable variable=standardvar]$MyPowerShellVar"

It is only available in the current job in the form $(standardvar)

Variable with a wider scope

If you want it to be available in another job, or stage you have to declare it thus, adding ;isOutput=true

write-host "##vso[task.setvariable variable=stagevar;isOutput=true]$MyPowerShellVar"

But there is also a change in how you access it.

  • You need to give the script that declares the variable a name so it can be referenced
  • You need to add dependons associations between stages/jobs
  • And the syntax used to access the variable changes depending on whether you are in the same job, same stage but a different job or a completely different stage.

Below is a fully worked example

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Updating the Azure Application client_secret used by Packer

As I have posted about previously, we create our Azure DevOps build agent images using the same Packer definitions as used by Microsoft. This time when I ran my Packer command to build an updated VHD I got the error

Build ‘vhd’ errored after 135 milliseconds 708 microseconds: adal: Refresh request failed. Status Code = ‘401’. Response body: {“error”:”invalid_client”,”error_description”:”AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app ‘6425416f-aa94-4c20-8395-XXXXXXX’ are expired. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka.ms/NewClientSecret, or consider using certificate credentials for added security: https://aka.ms/certCreds.rnTrace ID: 65a200cf-8423-4d52-af07-67bf26225200rnCorrelation ID: 0f86de87-33fa-443b-8186-4de3894972e1rnTimestamp: 2022-05-03 08:36:50Z”,”error_codes”:[7000222],”timestamp”:”2022-05-03 08:36:50Z”,”trace_id”:”65a200cf-8423-4d52-af07-67bf26225200″,”correlation_id”:”0f86de87-33fa-443b-8186-4de3894972e1″,”error_uri”:”https://login.microsoftonline.com/error?code=7000222″} Endpoint https://login.microsoftonline.com/545a7a95-3c4d-4e88-9890-baa86d5fdacb/oauth2/token==> Builds finished but no artifacts were created.

As the error message made clear, the client_secret had expired.

This value was originally set/generated when the Azure Service Prinicple was created. However, as I don’t want a new SP, this time I just wanted to update the secret via the Azure Portal (Home > AAD > Application Registration > [My Packer App].

The overview showed the old Secret had expired and I was able to create a new one on the Certificates and Secrets tab. However, when I update my Packer configuration file and re-ran the command it still failed.

It only worked after I deleted the expired secret. I am not sure if this is a requirement ( it is not something I have seen before) or just some propagation/cache delay.

But worth a blog post as a reminder to my future self and any other with a similar issue.

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Fix for Azure DevOps deployment to an environment stuck in “Job is pending” state

Issue

I had an Azure DevOps YAML based pipeline that had been working but was now getting stuck with the message “Job is pending…” when trying to start a stage in which there is a deployment to an environment.

Looking at the logs and Azure DevOps UI it was not obvious what the issue was.

Solution

Turns out it was due to environment checks and approvals. There was a branch policy on the environment. This was set to only allow use of Azure DevOps Templates on a given branch. The edit that had been done to the YAML meant it was trying to extend a template in a branch that was not in the approved list.

As soon as the working branch was added to the proved list it all worked as expected.

So if you see “Job is pending” errors with no obvious reason, check the environment approvals and checks. Remember, any issues with these don’t show up in the build log