OpenShift Easter Eggs - trolling dwalsh

This weekend is Easter in Australia, and it's always been one of my favourite holidays. The four-day weekend is a welcome break after the start of a new year; the weather is starting to cool down, and we can start building a fire; and kids are always super-excited at the prospect of chocolate!

One of the less well-known Easter traditions in Adelaide is the International Kite Festival, which takes place at Semaphore over the Easter long weekend. It's always a great event - whales and dragons, sea creatures and superheroes, and two- and four-string kites weaving colour through the skies.

One of my favourite things to do on Easter Sunday is an Easter Egg hunt. I hide those eggs everywhere - pot plants, BBQs, gas bottles, trees, no where is safe. I don't always remember where I put them though, and it's pretty common that I find a stray egg 12 months later somewhere in the backyard (still tastes great!).

I've written about OpenShift in a lot of articles to-date, including:

Application control for Everyone: Covers approaches to application control across different platforms, including OpenShift
OpenShift on an R620: Covers installing Single-node OpenShift to my trusty Dell R620.
OpenShift Virtualization Lab Build: Getting started with OpenShift Virtualization on my trusty Dell R620
Getting to grips with GPUs and OpenShift: Looks at how to integrate containers and virtual machines on OpenShift with NVIDIA GPUs
Phishing-resistant MFA for OpenShift: How to configure phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication in OpenShift
Trying out the OpenShift Virtualization Engine registry-less installer: Installing OpenShift in air-gapped environments without a container image registry
Hacking OpenShift Productivity with QMK: Baking OpenShift commands directly into my keyboard with QMK
Demystifying the OpenShift release image: A technical tear-down of the OpenShift release, and how its signature is validated and verified.

But, one thing I've never covered are the 'Easter Eggs' in OpenShift. So what better time to take a look!

Easter Eggs and software

"Easter eggs" have existed in software for decades now. An 'easter egg' in software can be a few different things - it could be a secret function, a message in the code, or just a humourous little joke.

One of the most famous Easter Eggs I think is Google's famous "do a barrell roll". I remember trying this out in high school - you could go to Google, type "do a barrell roll", and the browser would do a complete 360-degree spin.

Try it here!

One of my favourite examples of an 'easter egg' in software is from the Apollo-11 guidance computer. The entire Apollo 11 source code is available on GitHub, and the master ignition routine is named BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc.

The source code now also contains the back-story to this legendary Easter Egg:

## At the get-together of the AGC developers celebrating the 40th anniversary
## of the first moonwalk, Don Eyles (one of the authors of this routine along
## with Peter Adler) has related to us a little interesting history behind the
## naming of the routine.
##
## It traces back to 1965 and the Los Angeles riots, and was inspired
## by disc jockey extraordinaire and radio station owner Magnificent Montague.
## Magnificent Montague used the phrase "Burn, baby! BURN!" when spinning the
## hottest new records. Magnificent Montague was the charismatic voice of
## soul music in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles from the mid-1950s to
## the mid-1960s.
# BURN, BABY, BURN -- MASTER IGNITION ROUTINE

The Linux kernel `reboot` easter eggs

Even the legendary Linux kernel has easter eggs!

Restarting or halting a system is a destructive action, and the Linux kernel developers wanted to make absolutely sure that a random pointer error or a rogue process couldn't accidentally trigger a reboot.

To prevent this, the sys_reboot function in the kernel requires you to pass it two specific magic numbers as arguments. If the numbers don't match exactly, the kernel rejects the request and throws an EINVAL (Invalid argument) error.

The first argument must be LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC1, shown here:

/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note */
#ifndef _UAPI_LINUX_REBOOT_H
#define _UAPI_LINUX_REBOOT_H

/*
 * Magic values required to use _reboot() system call.
 */

#define	LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC1	0xfee1dead

Looks a lot like "feel dead"...

The second argument must be LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2, and the kernel will accept any of the four numeric values here to authorise the reboot, shown here:

#define	LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2	672274793
#define	LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2A 85072278
#define	LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2B 369367448
#define	LINUX_REBOOT_MAGIC2C 537993216

This one is a bit tricker. If you convert these decimal numbers to hex values, they reveal a set of dates formatted as DDMMYYYY (the only correct date format):

672274793 (0x28121969): December 28, 1969 — Linus Torvalds's birthday.
85072278 (0x05121996): December 5, 1996 — The birthday of his first daughter, Patricia.
369367448 (0x16041998): April 16, 1998 — The birthday of his second daughter, Daniela.
537993216 (0x20112000): November 20, 2000 — The birthday of his third daughter, Celeste.

Finding the compliance operator easter egg

From the Apollo 11 guidance computer to the Linux kernel, easter eggs are everywhere - including Openshift!

I'm going to show you one example today. To get to this Easter egg you need to first install the OpenShift compliance operator from the 'Ecosystem' tab.

Once installed, head to the 'openshift-compliance' namespace, and find the installed compliance operator.

Here you can see all of the APIs provided by the operator. We want to create a new 'Tailored Profile':

What's this?

setValues:
  - name: ocp4-var-selinux-state
    rationale: trolling dwalsh
    value: permissive

Trolling dwalsh

What does 'trolling dwalsh' mean, and why is this an easter egg?

dwalsh is Dan Walsh, aka "Mr SELinux". Dan worked at Red Hat from 2001-2025, leading the SELinux project, the container runtime engineering team, and is the author of Podman in Action. Famously Dan is the author of the SELinux colouring book:

In the "easter egg" above, the variable ocp4-var-selinux-state is set to permissive - effectively disabling SELinux. And, as Major Hayden, says at his great website stopdisablingselinux.com:

I've also heard that if you say setenforce 0 three times in the mirror Dan Walsh appears and forcibly sets setenforce 1 on your terminal...

This message is a 'nod' from the OpenShift developers to Dan Walsh, and his passion for good security practices, and ensuring that you stop disabling SELinux!

Wrapping up

This was a super short article, because it's the Easter weekend, and I have Easter eggs to hide in my backyard and forget about for 12 months.

I covered one of the "easter eggs" in OpenShift - can you find any others? Let me know in the comments!

Easter Eggs and software

The Linux kernel reboot easter eggs

Finding the compliance operator easter egg

Trolling dwalsh

Wrapping up

The Linux kernel `reboot` easter eggs