CentOS SCLo SIG Quarterly report

Tuesday , 8, January 2019 Rich Bowen Newsletter Leave a comment

CentOS SCLo SIG Quarterly report

Purpose

Packaging and maintaining Software Collections packages,
providing the ability to install several versions of various software side by side.

Releases and packages

Several new software collections were provided:

Some older software collections were retired due to their upstream End-of-Life status.
If a collection you depend on vanished from the repositories,
it is advised to upgrade to a newer variant of that collection as soon as possible.
As a last resort, the retired and unsupported packages can be found at CentOS vault.

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, January 2019 (#1901)

Tuesday , 8, January 2019 Rich Bowen Community, Newsletter 1 Comment

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

We wish you a happy and prosperous 2019, full of CentOS!

Releases and updates


December was a very busy month for releases and updates. The following releases and updates happened in December. For each update, the given URL provides the upstream notes about the change.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during December:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during December:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during December:

Other releases

The following releases also happened during December:

 

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS.

Cloud SIG

Last month the Cloud SIG produced a detailed quarterly report, which you can read in a separate post. This kind of detailed report is what we'd love to see from other SIGs in the future.

Software Collections SIG

The Software Collections SIG has also published a quarterly report, covering their progress in the last few months.

Other SIG Reports

Due to so many people taking time off in December to spend time with friends and family, several other SIG reports are running a little late. Don't worry, they're on the way, and you can see them here, on blogs.centos.org, in the next week or two. Thanks for your patience!

Events

Upcoming events

Coming up in February, we'll be participating in FOSDEM, with a table in the expo area, as most years. Drop by for all your CentOS sticker needs, or to tell us about what you're doing with CentOS! You can find out more about FOSDEM on their website at https://fosdem.org/2019/.

And, on the day before FOSDEM starts, we'll be holding our annual CentOS Dojo, at the Marriott near Grand Place. We'll have a full day of technical presentations (two tracks!) and, of course, the always valuable hallway track where you can talk with other people in the CentOS community. Attendance is free, but we need you to register, so that we can plan. Details, the schedule, and the registration like, are all on the event website at https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2019

There's a lot of other events around FOSDEM, too, that you might want to check out. These are loosely called the FOSDEM Fringe, and are listed here: https://fosdem.org/2019/fringe/

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

 

CentOS Cloud SIG Quarterly Report

Wednesday , 2, January 2019 Rich Bowen Uncategorized Leave a comment

01 September 2018 - 31 November 2018

Purpose

Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based Private cloud infrastructure applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Cloud

Membership Update

We are always looking for new members, especially representation from other cloud technologies.

The SIG agreed to replace the inactive SIG Chair, Kushal Das, with new chair Rain Leander, at the recent SIG gathering at CERN, in October.

No SIG members have been added in this quarter. However, the SIG membership list was updated on the SIG wiki page to reflect reality.

Releases and Packages

RDO

Aug 27 - Aug 31 Rocky Release https://blogs.rdoproject.org/2018/09/rdo-rocky-released/

Interesting features in the Rocky release include:

  • New neutron ML2 driver networking-ansible has been included in RDO. This module abstracts management and interaction with switching hardware to Ansible Networking.
  • Swift3 has been moved to swift package as the “s3api” middleware.

Other improvements include:

  • Metalsmith is now included in RDO. This is a simple tool to provision bare metal machines using ironic, glance and neutron.

The full release notes are at https://releases.openstack.org/rocky/highlights.html

Sep 10 - Sep 14 Stein Release Project Team Gathering

Oct 22 - Oct 26 Stein-1 milestone

Health and Activity

The Cloud SIG remains fairly healthy. However, it is still, for the most part, a monoculture containing only OpenStack.

In recent days, CloudStack has indicated an interest in once again participating in the SIG, with an eye towards providing CloudStack 4.11.2.0 rpms, and having more visibility in CentOS 8, in particular, once that is released.

Currently OpenStack group is focusing in preparing CentOS 8 support (E.g: python3, podman) through a fork of Fedora 28. This repository is used in upstream and downstream CI to reduce the gap as much as possible when CentOS 8 will be available.

Issues for the Board

We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.

Reminder: CentOS Dojo at FOSDEM just a few weeks away

Wednesday , 2, January 2019 Rich Bowen Community Leave a comment

We're looking forward to seeing all of you in Brussels next month!

The annual FOSDEM CentOS Dojo will be happening, as usual, on the Friday
before FOSDEM starts - February 1st, 2019 - at the Marriott Grand Place,
just a few minutes walk from Grand Place.

We do ask that you register, so that we can plan for space, budget, and
coffee breaks. We are currently about two thirds full, so don't wait!

More details, including the full schedule of presentations, and the
registration link, are on the event website:

https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Brussels2019 

See you in Brussels!

Fasttrack is back!

Thursday , 13, December 2018 pgreco announcement, upgrades 3 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a repository called fasttrack, and it used to get low priority updates before going through all the usual checks.

Eventually, that repo was deprecated, we couldn't delete it without breaking compatibility, so it just stayed there, empty and silent.

A few days ago, a bug appeared in bind, that was giving headaches to many people, we had a fix and wanted to give the users an option without waiting for the official build, so we decided to bring fasttrack back to life.

What will it be for?
Well, exactly for cases like this, simple fixes that the CentOS QA team or community members come up with, and helps users while they wait for the official solution.

How do I enable it?
sudo yum-config-manager --enable fasttrack
Then run yum update as usual.

What are the steps?
1) Submit your bug in https://bugs.centos.org/
2) If you have a patch, or a reference to the program's bug tracking system, add it to the bug.
3) This is the most important step, "Be patient!!!"
4) If all goes well, and we like the patch, we'll create a temporary build and point you to it in the bug entry.
5) You'll have to install and test that this build works.
6) If not done already, submit a bug in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/ and point it to the one created in CentOS.
7) Once all of this is done, we'll sign and push it to the fasttrack repo for everybody to use.

Please keep in mind that this repo is for "temporary" fixes, until Red Hat comes up with the real solution.

If you have any problems, please report back through the usual channels (irc, forums, Bug Tracker, Mailing Lists, etc)

Pablo.

Update: Added steps. all this is WiP at the moment.

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1811.01)

Saturday , 8, December 2018 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement 3 Comments

2018-12-12: We published new Vagrant images, v1811.02, fixing CentOS bug 15552 (wrong permissions on file /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant cause visudo -c to report an error, which can result in problems with Puppet).

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.10 and CentOS Linux 7.6.1810 for x86_64. All included packages have been updated to November 30th, 2018.

Known Issues

  1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile: 
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"

    We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.

  2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line 
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true

    to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".

  3. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools
  4. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. We don't have access to any Windows computer, but some people reported that adding the following line to the Vagrantfile fixed the problem: 
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.

If you never used our images before:

vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7

Existing users can upgrade their images:

vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:

$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc

Once you are sure that the checksums are properly signed by the CentOS Project, you have to include them in your Vagrantfile (Vagrant unfortunately ignores the checksum provided from the command line). Here's the relevant snippet from my own Vagrantfile, using v1803.01 and VirtualBox:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox, override|
    virtualbox.memory = 1024
    override.vm.box_download_checksum_type = "sha256"
    override.vm.box_download_checksum = "b24c912b136d2aa9b7b94fc2689b2001c8d04280cf25983123e45b6a52693fb3"
    override.vm.box_url = "https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1803_01.VirtualBox.box"
  end
end

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or in #centos on Freenode IRC.

Ackowledgements

I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.

I would also like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):

  • Graham Mainwaring, for helping with tests and validations;
  • Michael Vermaes, for testing our official images, as well as for writing the detailed guide to using them with VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro;
  • Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.

CentOS Atomic Host 7.1811 Available for Download

Friday , 7, December 2018 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1811), an operating system designed to run Linux containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

  • atomic-1.22.1-26.gitb507039.el7.centos.x86_64
  • cloud-init-18.2-1.el7.centos.1.x86_64
  • podman-0.11.1.1-3.git594495d.el7.centos.x86_64
  • docker-1.13.1-84.git07f3374.el7.centos.x86_64
  • etcd-3.2.22-1.el7.x86_64
  • flannel-0.7.1-4.el7.x86_64
  • kernel-3.10.0-957.1.3.el7.x86_64
  • ostree-2018.5-1.el7.x86_64
  • rpm-ostree-client-2018.5-2.atomic.el7.x86_64

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, qcow2 or Amazon Machine image. For links to media, see the CentOS wiki.

Upgrading

If you’re running a previous version of CentOS Atomic Host, you can upgrade to the current image by running the following command:

# atomic host upgrade

Release Cycle

The CentOS Atomic Host image follows the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host cadence. After sources are released, they’re rebuilt and included in new images. After the images are tested by the SIG and deemed ready, we announce them.

Getting Involved

CentOS Atomic Host is produced by the CentOS Atomic SIG, based on upstream work from Project Atomic. If you’d like to work on testing images, help with packaging, documentation – join us!

You’ll often find us in #atomic and/or #centos-devel if you have questions. You can also join the atomic-devel mailing list if you’d like to discuss the direction of Project Atomic, its components, or have other questions.

Getting Help

If you run into any problems with the images or components, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list.

Have questions about using Atomic? See the atomic mailing list or find us in the #atomic channel on Freenode.

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, December 2018 (#1807)

Tuesday , 4, December 2018 Rich Bowen Newsletter Leave a comment

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

Can you believe it's December already? Here's what's been happening in the past month at CentOS.

Releases and updates

The following releases and updates happened in November. For each update, the given URL provides the upstream notes about the change.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

There were no CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during November.

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during November:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during November:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS.

Virtualization SIG

We have two new member for Virt SIG: yuvalt and tomo

Upstream released oVirt 4.3.0 alpha on November 26th

Initial manual testing with 7.6 CR repo enabled are passing, waiting for CentOS 7.6 to GA.

Upstream preparing a first release candidate for 4.2.8, should go out on November 28th, GA is planned in January.
oVirt 4.3 is going to switch to GlusterFS 5, waiting to get it released along with CentOS 7.6.

We are working with OpsTools SIG to get ready for collectd 5.8.1, also coming with CentOS 7.6.

Waiting on CentOS infra for having an appliance shipping ovirt-guest-agent, hopefully with CentOS 7.6 GA.

Why your project should participate in a CentOS SIG

Last week we published an overview of Why your project should participate in a CentOS SIG. If you're involved in any open source project, and want it to have more exposure and better testing on CentOS, the SIGs are designed specifically for you. Join an existing SIG, or propose a new one that better fits your project.

The CentOS Container Pipeline Project

Did you know that CentOS Container Pipeline project offers an automated way of building CetntOS based containers? All you need to do to get started is add details about your open-source project to the container-index repository The service picks things up from there and rebuilds your container image every time you push a commit to the specified branch!

The team recently revamped the service architecture to be based on OpenShift. The service is hosted on CentOS infrastructure but can be easily deployed in your own infrastructure.

The project also scans container images for rpm, pip, npm and gem package updates; capabilities of resulting container; and integrity of RPM data. You can also leverage parent-child relationship to trigger a build of child image(s) whenever its parent image gets updated!

Got questions? Contact the team on 'container-apps' channel on Mattermost.

Events

Recent events

In November, we had a small presence at SuperComputing 18 in Dallas. While there, we talked with a few of the teams participating in the Student Cluster Competition. As usual, student supercomputing is #PoweredByCentOS, with 11 of the 15 participating teams running CentOS. (One Fedora, two Ubuntu, one Debian.)

Our congratulations go out to the team from Tsinghua University, who won this year's competition!

Upcoming events

In December, we'll be at the Red Hat booth at Kubecon in Seattle. Drop by for all of your CentOS sticker needs.

Coming up next year, we have two Dojos in the early part of the year that you'll want to be at.

In Europe, we have our annual Dojo at FOSDEM. It will be held at the Grand Place Marriott on Friday, February 1st, 2019. Registration is free, but we do need you to register, so that we can adequately plan. The schedule, details, and registration, are available on the event web page.

And, in North America, we have just announced our upcoming Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs, on Tuesday, April 16th, 2019. Initial information, and the call for presentations, is on the event web page.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

 

Why your project should participate in a CentOS SIG

Monday , 26, November 2018 Rich Bowen Community, General Leave a comment

When thinking about the CentOS Project, it’s natural to think of the Linux distro and how it makes operations and administration easy through sane package integration and management.  If you are an open source software project, though, how is the CentOS Linux platform useful to you beyond the operating system?

This is where SIGs come in.

Special Interest Groups (SIG) are smaller groups within the CentOS community that focus on a small set of issues, in order to either create awareness or to focus on development along a specific topic.

For example, the Cloud SIG produces packages for cloud infrastructure projects such as OpenStack and Cloudstack. And the Storage SIG produces packages for software defined storage projects, such as Gluster and Ceph.

Other SIGs, such as the Promotion SIG and the Artwork SIG, focus on non-technical aspects of the CentOS distribution, and are other ways to get involved in the life of the community. These SIGs are a topic for another day.

There are a number of reasons that your open source project might want to engage with a CentOS SIG.

CI and Packaging

The most important service that the CentOS Project provides to your project is the CI and packaging tools. These are described in the SIG Guide, along with other tools and resources that are available to SIGs.

By using the CentOS CBS (Community Build System) you can ensure that your project not only works flawlessly on CentOS, but also doesn’t have any conflicts with other projects that are providing packages for CentOS.

With help from the larger CentOS community, and other projects within your SIG, this relieves you of the need to be a CentOS expert yourself.

Easier to install on CentOS and RHEL

The primary output of a SIG is a repository of packages. This makes it easier for users of CentOS to install and use your project, with a simple ‘yum install’, and ensure that they’ll get all of the necessary dependencies with no additional effort on their part.

Community of like-minded developers

Other projects in your same subject area are often faced with similar problems. The SIG is a great place to solve those problems together, whether they are CentOS specific, or more generally applicable to your problem space.

Promotion of your project to CentOS users

Each time you push a release, this can be promoted to the CentOS community through our various social media channels, mailing lists, forums and newsletter. This expands the reach of your project to an audience who isn’t on your project promotional channels. This can be a real boon to smaller projects, as well as to projects that are very developer focused and don’t have much user/operator outreach.

A place for your users to address platform-specific issues

Problems that people have with your project are often actually problems with the platform on which they’re running them. Perhaps they don’t understand how services work on CentOS, or aren’t familiar with the configuration nuances that are specific to CentOS. Having a place where users can ask these questions, and get authoritative answers, can take a lot of the support burden off of your regular community, who, while deeply familiar with your project, maybe aren’t so familiar with the idiosyncrasies of CentOS.

Student supercomputing is #PoweredByCentOS at SC18

Wednesday , 14, November 2018 Rich Bowen Uncategorized Leave a comment

I'm at SC18 - the premiere international supercomputing event - in Dallas, Texas. Every year at this event, hundreds of companies and universities gather to show what they've been doing in the past year in supercomputing and HPC.

As usual, the highlight of this event for me is the student cluster competition. Teams from around the world gather to compete on which team can make the fastest, most efficient supercomputer within certain constraints. In particular, the machine must be built from commercially available components and not consume more than a certain amount of electrical power while doing so.

This year's teams come from Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, and come from a pool of applicants of hundreds of universities who have been narrowed down to this list.

Of the 15 teams participating, 11 of them are running their clusters on CentOS. There are 2 running Ubuntu, one Running Debian, and one running fedora. This is, of course, typical at these competitions, with Centos leading as the preferred supercomputing operating system.

The teams are given a variety of projects to work on before they get here, and then there is one surprise project that is presented to them when they arrive. They have 48 hours to work on these projects, and the winner is selected based on benchmarks and power consumption.

You can read more about the competition, and about the teams participating, on the SCC website.