v4.17 [August 2026]¶

• Release Date: August 2026
• Release Updates: Change History

Release Themes: Role-Based UX, Content Archive GA, Pipeline Reliability, Replication Scalability

Executive Summary¶

Digital Rebar v4.17 builds on the platform investments introduced in v4.16 with new capabilities across usability, packaging, and scalability.

This release introduces Role-Based UX, adding an Operator role to the Digital Rebar interface to clarify role-based responsibilities, with additional roles planned for future releases.

Content Archive, introduced as a Technical Preview in v4.16, reaches General Availability in v4.17.

Engineering continued modernizing DRP's pipeline infrastructure this cycle, further improving the reliability and flexibility of automated workflows across the platform. v4.17 introduces restartable provisioning pipelines, allowing a failed pipeline to resume from the phase where it stopped rather than restarting the machine, giving teams faster recovery at scale.

The Manager Replication Refactoring is completed in v4.17, including a shift to an on-demand, cached replication model that improves memory footprint and performance for large-scale, multi-site deployments.

Eikon, the native image deployment engine positioned to replace Curtin, reaches production readiness in v4.17, and the Curtin-based image-deploy plugin is now deprecated.

The RackN Portal receives a visual refresh in v4.17, including a new Dark Theme and general polish across the interface.

For customers using an external secret store such as Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault, drpcli set now rotates secrets directly in that store instead of overwriting them with an inline copy, preserving the reference secret.

Overall, v4.17 rounds out the usability, packaging, and scalability investments introduced in v4.16.

Important Notices¶

Release Information¶

New for this release:

• v4.17 Role-Based UX
• v4.17 Content Archive - General Availability
• v4.17 Pipeline Enhancements
• v4.17 Manager Replication Refactoring - Frontend Completion
• v4.17 Eikon - Production Ready
• v4.17 Portal Visuals Refresh
• v4.17 Writable External Secrets
• v4.17 List Command Default Limit
• v4.17 Deprecated OS Version Removals
• v4.17 Image Builder: OS-Agnostic Build Workflow

See other release notes for previous Release Information. All the incremental fixes to previous releases. See Change History

Vulnerabilities¶

Golang Updates¶

In order to reduce and attempt to prevent supply-chain attacks, RackN watches that golang security streams and updates the components that have issues. This release continues those updates.

Deprecations¶

OS Version Deprecation¶

Support for many of the operating system versions that are referenced in the various content packs are being marked as deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

These deprecations are based upon unsupported minor releases or end-of-life statements by the vendors.

The bootenvs are annotated in their documentation and descriptions.
See more information at RackN Provided Bootenv Lifecycle.

Image-deploy Plugin¶

The image-deploy plugin (Curtin) is deprecated as of v4.17 and will be removed in a future release, with no removal version set yet. With Eikon now production-ready, it's the recommended engine for all new image deployments, and operators should start planning their move rather than waiting for a removal announcement -- migration is a simple, reversible application profile swap, and RackN continues to collect feedback on Eikon usage and issues.

Removals¶

Deprecated OS Version Removals¶

Support for the operating system versions deprecated in v4.15 (see OS Version Deprecation) have been removed, covering superseded point releases and vendor end-of-life OS versions.

FEATURES¶

Role-Based UX¶

Digital Rebar v4.17 introduces the Operator Role into the Digital Rebar interface. This marks an important step in maturing DRP's user experience, giving organizations clearer separation of responsibilities and more granular control over platform access and configuration. Additional roles are planned for future releases.

Content Archive - General Availability¶

The Content Archive packaging format, introduced in v4.16 as a Technical Preview, reaches General Availability in v4.17. Content Archives simplify packaging and distribution by bundling object definitions, artifacts, and plugin extensions into self-contained, atomically upgradable packages while reducing on-disk overhead. This release completes full integration with the Content Catalog, UX interface, and Manager tools, building on operator feedback gathered since the v4.16 Technical Preview.

Pipeline Enhancements¶

With v4.17, DRP introduces restartable provisioning pipelines. A machine moves through the full pipeline in distinct phases for prepare, discover, hardware, operating system, and application, and if a pipeline fails, it resumes from the phase where it stopped rather than starting the machine over. Every run is queued and tracked phase by phase, so as teams adopt it, they gain faster recovery and less manual intervention when provisioning at scale.

Manager Replication Refactoring - Frontend Completion¶

Building on the backend redesign delivered in v4.16, v4.17 completes the corresponding frontend improvements for Manager Replication. This work directly addresses scalability requirements for RackN's largest enterprise deployments, extending the robustness and performance gains of the refactored replication backend to the operator-facing experience.

Multi-site manager (MSM) replication has been inverted, switching from an eager, streamed database model to an on-demand, cached model. This vastly improves the memory footprint in MSM systems of all sizes and is carefully optimized to ensure similar (or better) performance and latency for common operations, such as UX navigation, making MSM a much more tangible feature for large-scale systems.

Eikon - Production Ready¶

Eikon, the native image deployment engine positioned to replace Curtin, reaches production readiness in v4.17 and is now the recommended engine for image deployment. Additional information is available in Eikon Image Deploy and Eikon Architecture.

Major improvements to Eikon include:

• Deploys vendor cloud images -- including QCOW2 -- as either a whole-disk image or a rootfs archive onto a declarative storage layout with LVM, software RAID, and stable device identifiers
• Generates a UUID-based /etc/fstab so deployments boot reliably regardless of disk enumeration
• Consolidated bootloader handling across Debian and RHEL (UEFI and BIOS)
• Version-agnostic Windows deployment across Server 2019-2025 and Windows 10/11
• Support for airgap and authenticated (basic-auth/mTLS) image sources

Because Eikon shares Curtin's image-deploy parameters within the same workflow, switching engines -- or rolling back -- is simply a profile swap. With Eikon production-ready, the image-deploy plugin (Curtin) is deprecated in v4.17 and will be removed in a future release.

Portal Visuals Refresh¶

Sport the new Dark Theme while enjoying cleaner visuals across the RackN Portal. Theming options are available in the UX Config view, including high contrast and primary color preferences. This upgrade also includes new polish to the Catalog, the License Manager, and Notifications.

Writable External Secrets¶

Setting a secure parameter that resolves to a LookupUri now writes the value into the external store -- Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault -- instead of replacing the reference with an inline-encrypted value. Rotating an externally stored secret via the normal drpcli set now works, and the reference stays intact. The reference can live on the object or be inherited from a profile; either is followed. Pass --no-write-through to write the object's own copy instead.

Other Items of Note¶

None known

List Command Default Limit¶

To prevent accidental full-table scans on large systems, drpcli <object> list commands and the Python SDK (drppy_client) list_* methods now default to a page size of 1000 instead of unlimited (-1).

• CLI: drpcli machines list returns up to 1000 machines by default; pass --limit -1 to retrieve all.
• SDK: api.list_machines() returns up to 1000 machines by default; pass limit=-1 to retrieve all.

Operators relying on full-set returns from list commands or SDK calls should audit their scripts and explicitly set --limit -1 / limit=-1 (or paginate) where required.

References: provision-server#646, provision!1394, drppy_client!14.

Image Builder: OS-Agnostic Build Workflow¶

The image-builder content pack now ships a single image-builder-universal workflow that builds a gold image of any supported Linux distribution, replacing the seven per-OS workflows. Select the OS at runtime by setting linux/install-bootenv (for example alma-9.8-min, rocky-10, or ubuntu-24.04) — the same linux-selector mechanism used by universal-linux-install.

Update any automation referencing the removed workflow names (image-builder-alma8, -centos8, -centos, -rhel8-server, -rhel-server, -rocky8, -ubuntu-bionic). RHEL images that need subscription registration inject redhat-subscription-register via image-builder/pre-builder-flexiflow.

References: product-backlog#1615.

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements¶

Each component's version will move independently of other components. See Change History for more details.