Blog.CentOS.org - News, views and reports on CentOS

FOSDEM 2018

Tuesday , 6, February 2018 Rich Bowen Uncategorized Leave a comment

Another FOSDEM is history. I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the people that helped out at the CentOS table at FOSDEM, as well as at the Dojo before FOSDEM.

We had about 75 people in attendance at the Dojo on Friday, with 12 presentations from various speakers. Some of these presentations are already available on YouTube, with the rest coming over the next few days.

Traffic was steady at the CentOS table, from people new to Linux, all the way 15-year CentOS sysadmin veterans. A huge thank you to everyone who dropped by and chatted with us.

If you missed FOSDEM and the Brussels Dojo, there's always other opportunities to meet CentOS people. This year we expect to have another 4 or 5 Dojos around the world, starting in Singapore next month, and moving on to Meyrin (Switzerland), Oak Ridge (USA), and Delhi (India). If you'd like to host a Dojo anywhere in the world, please get in touch with the Centos-Promo mailing list to see how we can help you achieve your goal. We can usually help find speakers, venues, and funding for your event.

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1801.01)

Saturday , 20, January 2018 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement Leave a comment

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.4.1708 for x86_64 (based on the sources of RHEL 7.4). All included packages have been updated to 9 January 2017 and include important fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities affecting modern processors.

Known Issues

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.
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".
Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
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 (updated for this release).
Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. Try adding the following line to your Vagrantfile:
```
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

If the check passed, you can use the corresponding checksum when downloading the image with Vagrant:

$ export box_checksum="4440a10744855ec2819d726074958ad6cff56bb5a616f6a45b0a42d602aa1154"
$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum $box_checksum --provider libvirt --box-version 1801.02 centos/7

Feedback

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

Ackowledgements

We would like to warmly thank 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.

We would also like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically):

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.

Update : this blog post was updated on January Wednesday 24th to reflect different checksum as the image to use is 1801_02

Meltdown and Spectre: The response from CentOS

Thursday , 18, January 2018 Rich Bowen kernel, security, upgrades Leave a comment

As you are no doubt well aware, the Meltdown and Spectre bugs are hardware flaws in Intel and AMD chips, and have been all over the tech news for the last few weeks. If you need to get up to speed on what they’re all about, we recommend this great blog post.

CentOS, meanwhile, has not been idle, and has rolled out new kernels for CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 in response, both of which were announced on January 4th. ISO images were made available on January 8th.

Docker containers were made available on January 9th.

EC2 cloud images typically take a few extra days, and will be announced on the centos-announce mailing list.

On January 17th, Johnny Hughes announced an update to the microcode.dat on CentOS 6. You can read more about that in his tweet, and in this mailing list message.

For more information, and further updated, watch the centos-announce mailing list, and our various social media outlets:

PHP 7.2 for CentOS 7 armhfp

Monday , 15, January 2018 pgreco altarch, arm Leave a comment

What happens when you need something that is not readily available, but you can help get it done?
In my case, start harrassing people until you get all the info you need. Enter @arrfab and @remicollet.
Fabian got the builder ready, and contacted Remi who got me to use his SRPMS, all I had to do was push the packages to the builders and wait, and wait, and wait some more....

Status:
The current status is that we have php-7.2.1 working, as you can see in the screenshot, with only basic tests done for the moment, but all successful.
Most of the packages are built, some are being a little stubborn, but we'll get it done. But here is where you come in, we need testing (heavy testing), real user case scenarios.
If you want to see a Spectre of what things are going to be, and you are not afraid your computer may have a complete Meltdown, you can keep reading.

Installing:
Currently we are focused on building only the opt-in php replacement, and all the other platform dependant packages from Remi's repo (noarch rpms are not currently the main target, so you should get it from Remi's repo).
If you don't already have a "test subject", please follow the steps on https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/AltArch/Arm32 first, including EPEL, which is done with the following command:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo << EOF
[epel]
name=Epel rebuild for armhfp
baseurl=https://armv7.dev.centos.org/repodir/epel-pass-1/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF

Then all that is left is adding the test repo like this:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/php72-testing.repo << EOF
[php72-testing]
name=Remi php72 rebuild for armhfp
baseurl=https://armv7.dev.centos.org/repodir/community-php72-testing/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF

As I said before, we aren't rebuilding noarch packages, so if you need one of those, just add remi's repo like this:

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo << EOF
[remi]
name=Remi's RPM repository for Enterprise Linux 7 - $basearch
mirrorlist=http://cdn.remirepo.net/enterprise/7/remi/mirror
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://rpms.remirepo.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
EOF

Feedback:
Come find us on the CentOS on ARM-Dev list at https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/arm-dev

Thanks for testing!!!
Pablo.

CentOS Atomic Host 7.1712 Available for Download

Tuesday , 9, January 2018 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1712), a lean 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.

This release includes updated kernel, linux-firmware and microcode_ctl packages to address recent security advisories, alongside other minor updates that shipped during the month of December.

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

atomic-1.20.1-9.git436cf5d.el7.centos.x86_64
cloud-init-0.7.9-9.el7.centos.2.x86_64
docker-1.12.6-68.gitec8512b.el7.centos.x86_64
etcd-3.2.9-3.el7.x86_64
flannel-0.7.1-2.el7.x86_64
kernel-3.10.0-693.11.6.el7.x86_64
kubernetes-node-1.5.2-0.7.git269f928.el7.x86_64
ostree-2017.11-1.el7.x86_64
rpm-ostree-client-2017.9-1.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!

The SIG meets every two weeks as part of the Project Atomic community meeting at 16:00 UTC on Monday in the #atomic channel. 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 Atomic Host 7.1711 Available for Download

Tuesday , 5, December 2017 Jason Brooks announcement 1 Comment

Last week, the CentOS Atomic SIG released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1711), a lean 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.

This release rolls up a handful of minor CentOS updates from the past month. The core Atomic component versions are unchanged from those in the previous release (7.1710).

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

atomic-1.19.1-5.git48c224b.el7.centos.x86_64
cloud-init-0.7.9-9.el7.centos.2.x86_64
docker-1.12.6-61.git85d7426.el7.centos.x86_64
etcd-3.2.7-1.el7.x86_64
flannel-0.7.1-2.el7.x86_64
kernel-3.10.0-693.5.2.el7.x86_64
kubernetes-node-1.5.2-0.7.git269f928.el7.x86_64
ostree-2017.11-1.el7.x86_64
rpm-ostree-client-2017.9-1.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

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!

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.

SuperComputing17 Denver, #PoweredByCentOS

Monday , 27, November 2017 Rich Bowen Uncategorized 1 Comment

SC17, the largest SuperComputing event in the world, was held in Denver, Colorado, November 12 through 17th. I was lucky enough to attend the event as a representative of the CentOS community. While there, I spoke with dozens of organizations that use CentOS as part of their High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.

I also got to talk with all of the student teams participating in the Student Cluster Competition (SCC). The SCC is a high point of these events, for me, as you get to watch young people who are excited about technology and who have the amazing opportunity of getting to work with some of the best supercomputing hardware on the market.

Teams which compete in the competition must create a supercomputer from commercially available hardware (usually sponsored by various hardware vendors) and compete on a variety of standard benchmarks. Clusters must not exceed a specified power consumption (which varies from year to year). And a surprise application is given to the students when the on-site portion of the competition starts, to judge their ability to come up with a solution under pressure.

This year in Denver, there were 16 teams participating - 15 college teams, and, for the first time, a high school team made it to the finals. Of those, 12 teams were running CentOS, 1 Fedora, and 3 Ubuntu.

The team that won, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (51.8 Teraflops!), was, of course, running CentOS. They told me that they chose CentOS because it's pretty much an industry standard, and thus tends to have drivers available more reliably than alternatives.

As at the event in Frankfurt, I was able to interview several of the student teams, and you can watch those videos on my YouTube channel. Unfortunately, once again, the audio quality is awful, since supercomputer clusters are really, really loud.

If you are part of a team that participated in the SCC, we would love to hear your story. Get in touch via email (rbowen AT Red Hat DOT com) or via our @centosproject account on Twitter. And hopefully we'll see you in Singapore for SC-Asia, or in Frankfurt for ISC High Performance.

CentOS Linux 6 to CentOS Linux 7 Upgrade Tool

Friday , 17, November 2017 Johnny Hughes upgrades 2 Comments

There is an upgrade tool that allows for in-place upgrades from CentOS Linux 6 to CentOS Linux 7. This tool is Community Maintained, and information is available on the CentOS Wiki and on the CentOS Mailing List.

We currently do not have anyone from the Community maintaining the package, and in its current state it no longer works.

We really need someone from the CentOS Community to step up and maintain this Upgrade Tool, or we are going to have to remove it from the downloads area, since in it current state it can break people's machines if they try to use it.

If anyone would like to maintain the Upgrade Tool, please reply to the thread on the general CentOS Mailing List. (or you can contact me directly at johnny AT centos DOT org

CentOS Atomic Host (7.1710) Now Available for Download

Tuesday , 14, November 2017 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1710), a lean 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.

This release includes an updated version of rpm-ostree that allows for more flexibility when using rpm-ostree's package layering features.

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

atomic-1.19.1-5.git48c224b.el7.centos.x86_64
cloud-init-0.7.9-9.el7.centos.2.x86_64
docker-1.12.6-61.git85d7426.el7.centos.x86_64
etcd-3.2.7-1.el7.x86_64
flannel-0.7.1-2.el7.x86_64
kernel-3.10.0-693.5.2.el7.x86_64
kubernetes-node-1.5.2-0.7.git269f928.el7.x86_64
ostree-2017.11-1.el7.x86_64
rpm-ostree-client-2017.9-1.atomic.el7.x86_64

Package Layering with rpm-ostree

Using rpm-ostree package layering, it is possible to dynamically add more packages onto the system that are not part of the commit composed on the server. These additional "layered" packages are persistent across upgrades, rebases, and deploys. If a package you wish to layer conflicts with a package already in the atomic host image, a set of recently-added "override" commands can help resolve the conflict.

For instance, the "origin-clients" package can be used to quickly stand up an OpenShift Origin install using the command oc cluster up, but this package conflicts with the "kubernetes-client" package that comes baked into the CentOS Atomic Host image. You can use package layering to configure the repository containing the "origin-clients" rpm, to remove the conflicting kubernetes packages, and to install "origin-clients."

# rpm-ostree install centos-release-openshift-origin36
# rpm-ostree ex livefs
# rpm-ostree ex override remove kubernetes-client kubernetes-node
# rpm-ostree install origin-clients -r

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

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!

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.

YUM 4 is available for testing

Monday , 30, October 2017 Igor Gnatenko announcement, General, Installation 2 Comments

I am pleased to announce that YUM 4, based on DNF technology, is available for testing on CentOS Linux 7/x86_64. Our limited testing indicates no major problems, but I would love to find out how it fits into your existing YUM 3 workflows. So please consider filling out the short survey - your feedback helps us all get better.

YUM 4 provides significant improvements such as fast dependency resolution and a stable, documented API. See the references below for detailed improvements. We have made every effort to preserve the existing end-user experience that is available with YUM 3. This is the primary reason for making YUM 4 available for testing now.

“So, what all has changed?”

The documentation does a great job explaining the differences in great detail. In short, your existing experience using yum to install, remove, and update are identical. However, there are changes such as some of the plugins and yum utilities are now consolidated into `dnf-plugins-core`. Some of the yum CLI options changed and are either converted for you automatically or silently ignored when that behavior is automatically included. Existing custom plugins written for YUM 3 will not work with YUM 4. Please reference the DNF API Reference and Changes in DNF hook API compared to YUM 3 links for further information.

“I found a bug, what should I do?”

Please report any found bugs on Red Hat Bugzilla against Fedora/dnf component (make sure to mention versions and that you use package from CentOS).

And remember to submit feedback in the short survey.

“Three step install, get started right away”

# yum install centos-release-yum4
# yum --enablerepo=centos-yum4-testing install yum4
# yum4 --enablerepo=centos-yum4-testing install dnf-plugins-core

“I used DNF from EPEL, how do I move from it?”

Similar to clean installation: enable repository and update. YUM 4 is based on a newer version of DNF and should update properly.

# yum install centos-release-yum4
# yum --enablerepo=centos-yum4-testing update

NOTE: packages in testing repositories are not signed.

Many thanks to the CentOS Project team for their assistance in making this happen!

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