Here’s all the goodies for the week:

• Video recording
• Pad
• Status Board
• Juju.u.c Meeting Site

Updates this past week: vUDS

• Charm Auditing! Marco will be providing list of things and charms not up to snuff, post to list in order to get fixes (or eventually remove from store)

Blueprints Discussed:

• http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1305/track/servercloud/

Please check out the blueprints, there’s a ton of detail there!

Charm Tools

• Fixed dependency to recommend juju-core or juju, fixes Jono’s bug.
• charm-helpers being split into it’s own project: https://launchpad.net/charm-helpers
  • Rewriting a bunch of them into python instead of a mishmash of bash and python, gives us cross-OS compatability, better templating, easier testing.
  • Rolling out a single charm-helpers package

Docs

• Pre-beta live site (Nick hates it when we link it. :))
  • http://www.evilnick.org/juju/getting-started.html
  • Current docs not generating, filed RT, IS to complete by the end of this week.
  • Code: lp:~evilnick/juju/go-juju-docs -[arosales] Todo to make a better docs staging site

Charm Testing

• Rewriting the jitsu test code so it works as a juju plugin to enable easier testing.
• lp:juju-plugins

Charm Framework Updates

• node.js - Jeff Pihach linked up with Mims, experienced node.js dev. Good things on the roadmap here. We’ll get a better status when Mims returns from Gluecon
• rails/rack - Follow up with Pavel?
• Django, someone mentioned in UDS that it’s nearly ready to be submitted to the store.

CFPs & Upcoming Events

• Mark Mims is at Gluecon! Go get em!
• Submitted to Strata in NYC. (mims)
• Strata in London submission in progress (jamespage)
• TexasLinuxFest, arosales to present.

Charm Schools

• Next Friday is Part 2 of “How to write a charm”
• We’d like to have a roadmap for charm schools
• Over the next day or so Jorge to publish a schedule for charm schools, will be on the Events.
• We’d like to be responsive to user needs.
  • Keep biweekly cadence, be flexible enough to do on-the-spot charm schools.
• Jorge to add more detail to charm schools on the web page, show what topics were covered in more detail.

• capture the IRC Logs (duh!).

• Topics people want: Puppet/Juju, Charming from Scratch, Improving an existing charm (including the workflow to submit it back)

Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.10.3 are available for Kubuntu 13.04, 12.10 and 12.04. You can get them from the Kubuntu Updates PPA for 13.04 and from the Backports PPA for 12.10 and 12.04.

Bugs in the packaging should be reported to kubuntu-ppa on Launchpad. Bugs in the software to KDE.

A New Release

Today, I am happy to announce the release of Homerun 1.0.0. This new version comes with a few new features.

Let's start with the biggest one: favorite reordering by drag and drop. This is one of the most wanted feature requests for Homerun. It lets you reorder your favorite applications and places by holding down the left mouse button and dragging items around.

This short video demonstrates how it works:

This was surprisingly difficult to get right with QtQuick 1, so I am glad it's now done.

Note that while this feature is currently only available for the "Favorite Applications" and "Favorite Places" Homerun sources, it is actually possible for any source to provide reordering via drag and drop if it makes sense for this source to do so.

Another new feature is the ability to customize shortcuts. This started with the idea of creating a cheatsheet of Homerun shortcuts, but I was worried the list in the cheatsheet would not be kept up to date with the actual shortcuts so I looked into generating the content of the cheatsheet from the code handling the shortcuts. At one point I realized kdelibs already provided what I wanted and more in the form of the standard shortcut dialog, so I scraped my code and went for exposing the standard KDE shortcut dialog. You can reach it from the configure menu in the top-right of the screen.

Finally, other minor improvements have been made:

• The context menu of the "Trash" folder now has an "Empty Trash" entry,
• When an application or place is marked as a favorite, a short message appears on the top of the screen, reassuring you that your request has been taken into account.

As usual, this new release is available on download.kde.org.

Moving On

This release is my last Homerun release: I am passing over maintenance to Eike Hein, who you may know as the man behind Konversation and Yakuake. I am confident Homerun is in good hands with him.

As for me, I am going to return to what I enjoy most: working on applications. In the next months I plan to get more involved in KDEPIM, starting with what I do best: obsessing beyond reason about widgets layouts and margins. Once I feel familiar enough with the code base, I'll try to get a bit out of my comfort zone and help fixing underlying bugs.

Silvia Bindelli and Cheri Francis worked to prepare the Ubuntu Women session at the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit last week where the following was covered:

Plans for an information-based online scavenger-hung competition that the team will be doing in the coming months. We’re currently seeking volunteers to assist coming up with questions related to women in tech and Ubuntu and to work with us when “grading” the answers that come in.

A user poll to see how the team could be most effective in serving our audience of women interested in Ubuntu. We have found that the project needs a bit of an adjustment every couple of years to refocus on our current targets as Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem evolves.

Finally, much of the session was spent discussing our intention to further collaborate with other groups seeking to encourage women in open source (and in technology in general). A couple of our members will be attending Ada Camp in San Francisco next month and hope to make some connections there. We’re also reaching out to our current community members who are involved in other groups.

Thanks to everyone who participated and we’re looking forward to continuing discussions and work on all these items in the coming months.

Video from our session is available here:

Blueprint for the next few months can be found here: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu-women.org/+spec/community-1305-ubuntu-women

Recently we had our online Ubuntu Developer Summit where we discussed a range of topics, defined next steps, and documented work items. The very last session at the event was an overall summary of the tracks (you can watch the video here), but I wanted to blog an overall summary too. These notes are quick and to the point, but they should give an overall idea of decisions made.

Client

• Content Handling -

  • Siloing apps.
  • Main applications will define a “main repo” and provide an API to deliver, share and access the data in the main repo.

• X.org

  • Want to update to 1.14 or even 1.15 if the video ABI doesn’t change.

• System Settings

  • Focus on the phone settings defined here.

• Scopes

  • Scopes that didn’t land in 13.04 should land within 2 weeks.
  • Several scopes will be migrated from Python to either C++ or Go for memory purposes.

• Chromium

  • Expressed interest in moving to Chromium as default for a better user experience. Gathered feedback on the possible move. Next steps are to take discussion to the mailing list.

• Unity 8/Mir Preview in 13.10

  • Want to have a preview of Ubuntu 8 (Phablet UI) running on Mir as an optional session (installable from universe or PPA, most likely).

Foundations

• Reviewed the current 13.10 release schedule found several changes made in 13.04 that mistakenly hadn’t been carried over, such as later freeze dates and one fewer alpha; Adam Conrad will be syncing all this up and sending mail to the ubuntu-release list for review.
• We discussed the positioning of the development release in light of some conversations last cycle, and put some more flesh on the design for making it easier for people to follow along with the development release all the time.
• This cycle, we’ll be bringing up a new 64-bit ARM architecture based on cross-building work done last cycle, and we’ll update developers on that once we get closer to the point of starting up builds in Launchpad.
• Moving forward with click packages. Fleshed out ideas on source package provision, integrating with existing client package management stacks, and clarifying some other things like the security model.
• For image based upgrades, the team held a demo and Q&A for the current proposed solution, which is split into client, server, and upgrader; client is going well and expected to land by the end of June, server is currently blocked on infrastructure but should be ready around the same time, and Ondrej Kubik has been making good progress at tweaking the CyanogenMod recovery environment for the upgrader.
• Firmed up the plan for packaging Android components for Ubuntu Touch images.
• Upstart will be used as the standard way of spawning desktop apps for Unity on touch devices and ideally on desktop too (Unity 7 and 8). This will let us make sure we only have one instance per app, and will make it easy to apply AppArmor, seccomp and cgroup confinement consistently to all apps.
• Defined a goal to reduce the amount of time it takes to prepare, test and make a Checkbox release, automating more of the process. This will benefit people who use the Checkbox tool as part of their daily work. It’s possible that Checkbox may move to Universe, although this needs some more discussion.
• The server certification tools are being reengineered to use the new plainbox engine as their core. This will preserve the existing UI, but we’ll have co-installable packages with the new core, and will eventually switch over to the new tools.
• The cert tools and test suite are being upgraded to work well on ARM for our hyperscale and mobile work, fixing any issues so we can get full, clean test runs on ARM servers. MaaS will be used for provisioning, and tested as a part of the ARM server solution.
• We will be basing the primary kernels for 13.10 on Linux 3.10, but will strongly consider 3.11 depending on timing. For Ubuntu Touch devices, we already have kernels available for Nexus 4 and 7, and plan to also bring up kernels for Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 10. We’ll provide a 13.04 hardware enablement kernel in the 12.04.3 point release.
• In terms of Ubuntu Touch power management, we have some preliminary baselines against Android on Nexus 4 and will replicate those on other devices, although they won’t be entirely meaningful until things like Mir land. We’ve written some new utilities such as eventstat to track down problems here. On power management policy, we agreed key requirements for the system power manager and we’ll extend powerd to serve our immediate needs.

Community

• Community Roundtable:

  • Approved LoCo teams are no more, will be verified teams.
  • Bringing back fortnightly leadership meetings.
  • Ubuntu Advocacy Kit is driving to 1.0.
  • Gathered UDS feedback.

• Ubuntu Community Website

  • Great discussion which clarified everybody’s involvement in the project.
  • Clear roadmap for completing the content and design in the next few weeks.
  • Design and web team have the templates we need to finish the work.
  • No discussion with IS yet around deployment – this will be coordinated next week.

• Ubuntu Womens Session

  • Several events planned to get more people involved and the word out (Career Days, UOW, etc.).
  • Discussion about a women in technology themed event at CLS.

• Ubuntu Status Tracker

  • The status tracker is many things to many different teams, but we managed to figure out a number of issues we can tackle, which should make everybody’s lives easier.
  • Removal of kanban view.
  • Add links from team pages to milestones pages.
  • Set up a meeting to discuss setting up an “ongoing” dev series.

• Ubuntu On Air! Discussion

  • Issues with supporting multiple hosts.
  • Discussion about building support into summit and re-using vUDS components to support more shows and multiple hosts.
  • We want to open it up to more contributors, so we get more variety into the shows.

• Development Onramp for Touch / Unity Next

  • Goals to improve docs.
  • We will track contributions to all the projects to see how we improve.
  • Increased focus on testing, coordination with the SDK team.

• Documentation Team

  • Update Getting Started Page, review current docs and previous mailing list feedback.
  • Regular doc review cadence and more health check meetings.
  • Focus on content in the UAK.

• Ubuntu Enterprise Desktop Discussions

  • Another meeting will be planned to get more input from users of enterprise desktops.
  • Some common issues were identified and discussed:
  • outdated cfengine package
  • access to Firefox/Thunderbird packages before publication (resolved)
  • support for livemeeting/linc

• More Ubuntu Touch images

  • We identified the current blockers and will simplify thingsby using an image without firmware blobs, so they can be added by a local tool afterwards.
  • After the rebase to saucy we will also update the docs accordingly.
  • Kernel images for devices will first live in PPA, afterwards probably in universe.

• Regular Ubuntu Development Updates

  • Organise regular Ubuntu on Air Hangouts to which we invite people from news sites as moderators.
  • Briefly summarise work from the last week(s).
  • Ask engineers to demo/showcase interesting developments.
  • Do Q&A sessions.
  • Also invite members of governance teams along.

Cloud and Server

• Openstack Next Steps

  • Looked at some high level areas for this cycle, avoiding digging into areas covered by other sessions. We decided that at current, moving over to Git for our packaging work doesn’t add value. We also agreed to clean up on some cruft within the packaging branches.

• Cloud Archive Status Check

  • Decided we had to support Grizzly for 12 months, which exposes a 3 month support gap from the backing Raring release. Need to discuss with the security team about how to fill this gap. Reviewed proposal for SRU cadence and tentatively rubber stamped.
  • Better co-ordination around trumping by Security dates, specifically if it covers more than one project.
  • Looked at using updates as a reason to increase our messaging.

• 12.04.x images with LTS Enablement Kernel

  • The cloud images currently only contain the Precise (3.2) kernel. Discussed adding the kernel HWE stack to cloud images. We need to document how to enable backports, clearly state the support, and possibly tool cloud-init to handle updating the kernel on boot if folks need a more recent kernel on boot.
  • We will not be creating new images with the HWE kernel for the default images. The HWE kernel will be used for Clouds that have a high velocity of change in the Hypervisor (i.e. Windows Azure). For the regular images, we will investigate tooling in cloud-init and other places to make the ingestion of the HWE kernels easier, such as enhancing the documentation, allowing for easier enablement of backports, and making it easier to enable the HWE kernel at boot time.

• Cloud-Init for Vagrant

  • We will create a good Ubuntu development workflow for Vagrant users (cross platform OSX, Windows). Ben Howard will investigate cloud-init tooling as well as the best method to enable the DKMS modules.

• Cloud Init & Cloud Image Development for Saucy

  • We will define the development work to improve cloud-init and cloud images for the saucy cycle.
  • Discussed work on pre-cloud init phase, vendor hooks, cloud init plugin, and rebuding tools.

• Juju Core Development

  • 1.10 version of juju available in backports for 13.04, and should be available in precise backports soon.
  • Look for releases in juju/dev ppa updating weekly, juju PPA monthly, and have stable release go into backports (couple of times per cycle).

• OpenStack Hypervisors

  • HyperV support is currently untested.
  • VMWare support in charms, but not primary supported charms.
  • We need a matrix to demonstrate interoperability and support of each variation.
  • Need to work out additional hardening support.

• Openstack QA

  • Building on our great history, moving away from per commit hardware testing to a more fluid multi virtualised separated environment, allowing greater interoperability testing. Hardware Cert term showed interest in getting more involved. The scope of this will be ratified when the interop matrix is created.

• Flag Bearer Charms

  • Will improve flag bearer charm integration testing.
  • Implement list of reference charms.
  • Develop Percona backup XtraBackup flag bearer charm.
  • Document flag bearer and reference charm criteria in best practices.
  • Discuss flag bearer charms on mailing list.

• Charm Policy Review

  • Add into policy for a charm to provide a config option to specify the version. The other items such as installation location (ie /srv), implementation of common subordinates, backups are to be added to best practices. The 3 ack on charm reviews is still under discussion.
  • Split Juju docs best practices and policy sections.

• Audit Charms

  • Discussed re-reviewing the current charms in the charm store to ensure accurate readmes, tests, functionality, rating, categories, and icons. The workflow was discussed for queues, and which charms to tackle first.

• Charm Development Tooling

  • Discussed gathering all the different charm development tools into one central package. These charm development tools include charm-tools, charmsupport, juju-gui,openstack-charm-helpers. Folks also discussed how the tools could be improved, and used as a singular set.

• Juju Framework Charm for Server Application Technologies

  • Discussed further building out of the Django, Rails, Node.js, and possibly Java.

• Improve Juju Documentation

  • Make a better user and charm developer experience for juju.ubuntu.com/docs. Discussed getting a permanent beta site going, methods to get documentation contributions. Hopefully a revamped docs will be in production in the next couple of weeks, and if not we’ll have a beta site very shortly (days).

• Juju Charm Testing

  • Currently jenkins.qu.u.c has graph testing showing reliable results. Marco will be landing integration soon (days), with a more formal testing framework to follow (weeks).
  • Some ideas discussed were to gate charm store commits on testing, showing testing status in the GUI, and pre-deployment testing. Test examples will be made available along with a charm testing school.

• Add User Feedback loops and Social Networking to Charm Store Charm Pages

  • Discussed making sure users have a method to give and receive feedback on a per charm basis. We currently have social networking (+1s, Likes, Tweets) in addition to downloads, quality rating, bug links, and testing status. Some ideas were to get clarification from design on showing social networking numbers, as well as a ‘leave feedback’ form.

• Juju GUI Development

  • Discussed development done, and upcoming work. Covered ideas such as design, bundles, diagnostics, user data, juju feature parity, maintenance and support.

• Improving QA for seeded server packages

  • Established three distinctive areas of testing, these are upstream test suites which typically run at build-time, integration tests via dep8 and service level testing which often requires multiple nodes and is conducted using juju.
  • We established that there is the regression test suite that can be included in many of the packages directly, with the requirement that we package some of the common ubuntu testing libraries.
  • Discussed some areas of standardisation for dep8 testing.

• Fastpath installer work for 13.10

  • Established what FPI is, and the processes which are part of it.
  • Fast Path installer will be delivered as a installable package in Ubuntu, most likely in python. The interface to it will we yaml formatted configuration.

• OpenStack Charm work for Saucy/Havana

  • Migrate all charms to be python based.
  • Consolidation into new charm-helpers nextgen library.
  • Complete SSL/HTTPS support into charms.
  • Integration of wiki and help documentation, upstream series aligned with upgrading notes.
  • Design around how proprietary+1 plugins will be integrated into core charms for Cinder and Quantum.

• Investigate alternatives to mysql

  • Agreed that the best course of action was to maintain mysql for this cycle, and try and support other flavours of mysql getting into Ubuntu via Debian.

• Ceph activities for Saucy

  • Dumpling release will be out in August (co-incides with FF for Saucy) so will be target for this release.
  • Lots of incremental improvements in efficiency and performance, full RESTful API for RADOS Gateway admin features, block device encryption for data at rest.
  • ceph-deploy (upstream cross platform deploy tooling) will be packaged.
  • Implementation of more automated testing during Saucy.

• HA Openstack charms V2

  • Reviewed the current state of HA support in Openstack charms. Percona has volunteered to charm their offering, allowing great coverage by their mysql HA variant for active/active clustering.
  • Work also on active/active and brokerless messaging options (ZeroMQ) and incremental improvements for service check monitoring in load balancers.
  • Cluster stack (Corosync/Pacemaker) to be reviewed and upgraded for Saucy in preparation for 14.04.

• MongoDB activities for Saucy

  • File Main inclusion report for Mongo to support Ceilometer and Juju use cases. Raise a Micro Release Exemption (MRE) to the techboard, as point releases are bug fix only.
  • Upstream armhf enablement patches. Re-sync with Debian. OpenSSL license exception.

• Virtualization Stack Work for Saucy

  • If debian libcgroup maintainer finds time, we’d like to merge cgroup-lite into libcgroup. For per-user configuration, first make it default-off optional, conditional on userns sysctl being enabled.
  • LXC work is going well on track to 14.04 (and lxc 1.0) roadmaps. For this cycle, we’d like to get user namespaces enabled in the saucy kernel with a new off-by-default sysctl controling unprivileged use, and complete the ability to create and start basic containers without privilege; add console, attach and snapshot to the API, complete the create API function, and convert all of the lxc-* programs to use the API; write a libvirt driver based upon the API, and a patch to enable testing it with openstack; write loopback and qcow2 block device drivers; Get the subuid (user namespace enablement) patches into the shadow package; discuss with the community the maintenance of stable trees; improve the API thread safety; and work our distro lxc tests into the upstream package (akin to how it is done in netcf).
  • In edk2, we want to contribute to the implementation of the ability to save and restore nvvars from the ovmf bios from qemu. We’ll fix the apparmor bug preventing the block device mounting in libvirt-lxc, which is blocking use of that feature by openstack.
  • We intend to merge libvirt at least at version 1.0.6, qemu at 1.5, and hopefully xen 4.3. We’ll follow up on citrix’ plans for xcp. The blueprint lists additional xen work planned. We’ll also look into default use of openvswitch bridges in libvirt.

Quality Assurance

• Core Apps

  • Autopilot testcases written for ubuntu core applications will be checked to ensure they pass before auto-landing updates in the ubuntu touch images.
  • The quality community team will help core application developers develop a suite of manual testcases for each ubuntu core application. These will be run as part of the verification process for the 1.0 stable release of each application.

• Testcases

  • Add testcases so all default desktop applications for each flavor are covered.
  • Expand and improve server testcases to allow more participation by those who might lack domain specific knowledge and/or hardware.

• Growth/Experience

  • Make available documentation more accessible by linking to it from the tools we use for testing, like the qatracker.
  • Continue holding testing ‘how-to’ and knowledge sharing sessions during UDW, UOW, as part of UGJ, and on ubuntu on air.
  • Add testing achievements to the ubuntu accomplishments project.

• Ubuntu Touch

  • Ubuntu Touch images will be smoke tested using the pending/current model already in use for other images. This ensures no image is published for general consumption that doesn’t pass a set of tests ensuring basic functionality of the image.
  • Current Ubuntu Touch autopilot tests for the core applications will be investigated for use as part of these smoke tests.
  • The concept of smoke test is going to be expanded to cover a no regression build.

• Autopilot

  • Autopilot 1.3 is now released and will be available in raring and saucy. No quantal support is planned. Precise support is being examined, but requires further investigation and backporting work.
  • Autopilot developers will now be available on #ubuntu-autopilot — no need to always ping thomi!

• Mir

  • Planned tests for stressing mir to ensure good behavior during stressed conditions for things like OOM, memory leaks and race conditions.
  • Stress tests targeted to be run as often as possible, but might be limited due to time constraints of wanting to run the tests over a longer period of time.

• UTAH

  • UTAH will be expanded to include automated upgrade testing capabilities. UTAH jobs will be created for bootstrapping base images, for performing upgrades, and running post-upgrade tests. The old auto-upgrade-testing tool can still be used by flavors if desired.

• Dashboard

  • Create high-level views of the state of quality in ubuntu by aggregating results of test runs. This will allow for ‘problem’ areas within ubuntu to be more easily identified and targetted for further testing or investigation by interested parties. You can follow this work on the QA dashboard here.

• Upstream

  • autopilot-gtk will now be maintained by the upstream QA team. Bug fixes and outstanding issues will be solved in order to allow for the autopilot desktop tests to run
  • Once running properly, the autopilot desktop tests will become a part of daily image testing
  • Continue development on umockdev to add support for more exotic networking tests (eg, 3G) and research sound testing

As ever, you can track progress on work items on status.ubuntu.com and we hope to see you at the next UDS in three months.

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20130521 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

Q/master: lp1176977 (“XFS instability on armhf under load”) – working with
upstream on this one: i already backported a fix that turn the vmalloc() exhaustion
and fs shutdown to an -ENOSPC error, and this second error seems to be triggered
by the tiny fs used in these tests (~2GB). Still working to get it
properly fixed.
R/master: lp1171582(“[highbank] hvc0 getty causes random hangs”) -
the jtag console has a 1-char producer-consumer buffer and if there’s no
real hw attached to the board, any subsequent write turn into an endless loop
waiting for a consumer. The situation is worsened by the fact
that before writing to this register a tty spinlocked is taken, and
any subsequent tentative to pick this spinlock makes the thread hang -
got a confirmation of the problem, some info about the hw, and i’m working on this.

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kt-meeting.txt

Milestone Targeted Work Items

The burn down charts have not yet been reset for 13.10, so disregard the
second link posted abovefor now. I’ll be cleaning up and adding work
items for 13.10 so that the +upcomingwork link will be more accurate.
Next week I’ll have the usual nag table available.

Status: Saucy Development Kernel

For now, we’ll plan on targetting the v3.10 kernel for Saucy but will
strongly re-evaluate a move to v3.11 in the coming months. We’ve just
rebased Saucy to v3.10-rc2 and are still cleaning up some of the
carnage. I don’t anticipate we’ll upload until a later -rc which will
hopefully provide more stability.
Importand upcoming dates:
Thurs June 20 – Alpha 1 (opt in)

Status: CVE’s

== 2013-05-21 (28 days) ==
Currently we have 63 CVEs on our radar, with 8 CVEs added and 17 CVEs retired in the last 28 days.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/ALL-linux.html

  Overall the backlog has decreased slightly this week:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/status/cve-metrics.txt

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/CVE-linux.txt

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Raring/Quantal/Precise/Oneiric/Lucid/Hardy

Support for Oneiric and Hardy expired on May 9th.
Status for the main kernels, until today (May. 21):

• Lucid – In Testing;
• Precise – In Testing; 2 upstream releases;
• Quantal – In Testing; 2 upstream releases;
• Raring – In Testing; 3 upstream releases;
  Current opened tracking bugs details:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kernel-sru-workflow.html

  For SRUs, SRU report is a good source of information:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/sru-report.html

  Future stable cadence cycles:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RaringRingtail/ReleaseInterlock

Open Discussion or Questions? Raise your hand to be recognized

Thanks everyone

For a while, I have been wanting to write about MAAS and how it can easily deploy workloads (specially OpenStack) with Juju, and the time has finally come. This will be the first of a series of posts where I’ll provide an Overview of how to quickly get started with MAAS and Juju.

What is MAAS?

I think that MAAS does not require introduction, but if people really need to know, this awesome video will provide a far better explanation than the one I can give in this blog post.

http://youtu.be/J1XH0SQARgo

 

Components and Architecture

MAAS have been designed in such a way that it can be deployed in different architectures and network environments. MAAS can be deployed as both, a Single-Node or Multi-Node Architecture. This allows MAAS to be a scalable deployment system to meet your needs. It has two basic components, the MAAS Region Controller and the MAAS Cluster Controller.

Region Controller

The MAAS Region Controller is the component the users interface with, and is the one that controls the Cluster Controllers. It is the place of the WebUI and API. The Region Controller is also the place for the MAAS meta-data server for cloud-init, as well as the place where the DNS server runs. The region controller also configures a rsyslogd server to log the installation process, as well as a proxy (squid-deb-proxy) that is used to cache the debian packages. The preseeds used for the different stages of the process are also being stored here.

Cluster Controller

The MAAS Cluster Controller only interfaces with the Region controller and is the one in charge of provisioning in general. The Cluster Controller is the place the TFTP and DHCP server(s) are located. This is the place where both the PXE files and ephemeral images are being stored. It is also the Cluster Controller’s job to power on/off the managed nodes (if configured).

The Architecture

As you can see in the image above, MAAS can be deployed in both a single node or multi-node. The way MAAS has being designed makes MAAS highly scalable allowing to add more Cluster Controllers that will manage a different pool of machines. A single-node scenario can become in a multi-node scenario by simply adding more Cluster Controllers. Each Cluster Controller has to register with the Region Controller, and each can be configured to manage a different Network. The way has this is intended to work is that each Cluster Controller will manage a different pool of machines in different networks (for provisioning), allowing MAAS to manage hundreds of machines. This is completely transparent to users because MAAS makes the machines available to them as a single pool of machines, which can all be used for deploying/orchestrating your services with juju.

How Does It Work?

MAAS has 3 basic stages. These are Enlistment, Commissioning and Deployment which are explained below:

Enlistment

The enlistment process is the process on which a new machine is registered to MAAS. When a new machine is started, it will obtain an IP address and PXE boot from the MAAS Cluster Controller. The PXE boot process will instruct the machine to load an ephemeral image that will run and perform an initial discovery process (via a preseed fed to cloud-init). This discovery process will obtain basic information such as network interfaces, MAC addresses and the machine’s architecture. Once this information is gathered, a request to register the machine is made to the MAAS Region Controller. Once this happens, the machine will appear in MAAS with a Declared state.

Commissioning

The commissioning process is the process where MAAS collects hardware information, such as the number of CPU cores, RAM memory, disk size, etc, which can be later used as constraints. Once the machine has been enlisted (Declared State), the machine must be accepted into the MAAS in order for the commissioning processes to begin and for it to be ready for deployment. For example, in the WebUI, an “Accept & Commission” button will be present. Once the machine gets accepted into MAAS, the machine will PXE boot from the MAAS Cluster Controller and will be instructed to run the same ephemeral image (again). This time, however, the commissioning process will be instructed to gather more information about the machine, which will be sent back to the MAAS region controller (via cloud-init from MAAS meta-data server). Once this process has finished, the machine information will be updated it will change to Ready state. This status means that the machine is ready for deployment.

Deployment

Once the machines are in Ready state, they can be used for deployment. Deployment can happen with both juju or the maas-cli (or even the WebUI). The maas-cli will only allow you to install Ubuntu on the machine, while juju will not only allow you to deploy Ubuntu on them, but will allow you to orchestrate services. When a machine has been deployed, its state will change to Allocated to <user>. This state means that the machine is in use by the user who requested its deployment.

Releasing Machines

Once a user doesn’t need the machine anymore, it can be released and its status will change from Allocated to <user> back to Ready. This means that the machine will be turned off and will be made available for later use.

But… How do Machines Turn On/Off?

Now, you might be wondering how are the machines being turned on/off or who is the one in charge of that. MAAS can manage power devices, such as IPMI/iLO, Sentry Switch CDU’s, or even virsh. By default, we expect that all the machines being controlled by MAAS have IPMI/iLO cards. So if your machines do, MAAS will attempt to auto-detect and auto-configure your IPMI/iLO cards during the Enlistment and Commissioning processes. Once the machines are Accepted into MAAS (after enlistment) they will be turned on automatically and they will be Commissioned (that is if IPMI was discovered and configured correctly).. This also means that every time a machine is being deployed, they will be turned on automatically.

Note that MAAS not only handles physical machines, it can also handle Virtual Machines, hence the virsh power management type. However, you will have to manually configure the details in order for MAAS to manage these virtual machines and turn them on/off automatically.

If you're running an Android device with GNU userland Linux in a chroot and need a full network access over USB cable (so that you can use your laptop/desktop machine's network connection from the device), here's a quick primer on how it can be set up.

When doing Openmoko hacking, one always first plugged in the USB cable and forwarded network, or like I did later forwarded network over Bluetooth. It was mostly because the WiFi was quite unstable with many of the kernels.

I recently found out myself using a chroot on a Nexus 4 without working WiFi, so instead of my usual WiFi usage I needed network over USB... trivial, of course, except that there's Android on the way and I'm a Android newbie. Thanks to ZDmitry on Freenode, I got the bits for the Android part so I got it working.

On device, have eg. data/usb.sh with the following contents.
#!/system/xbin/sh
CHROOT="/data/chroot"

ip addr add 192.168.137.2/30 dev usb0
ip link set usb0 up
ip route delete default
ip route add default via 192.168.137.1;
setprop net.dns1 8.8.8.8
echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8' >> $CHROOT/run/resolvconf/resolv.conf
On the host, execute the following:
adb shell setprop sys.usb.config rndis,adb
adb shell data/usb.sh
sudo ifconfig usb0 192.168.137.1
sudo iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s 192.168.137.0/24
echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
sudo iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPTThis works at least with Ubuntu saucy chroot. The main difference in some other distro might be whether the resolv.conf has moved to /run or not. You should be now all set up to browse / apt-get stuff from the device again.

Update: Clarified that this is to forward the desktop/laptop's network connection to the device so that network is accessible from the device over USB.

For graphics testing on Ubuntu I typically ssh into one or more test machines, fiddle with them, reboot them, and then re-ssh into them. Since the machine won’t accept ssh connections until it’s pretty far along in boot, I often have to re-ssh multiple times. Instead, I made a script that retries ssh until it succeeds.

#!/bin/bash # pingssh if [ -z "${1}" ]; then echo "Usage: pingssh " fi host=$1 while : ; do count=50 while ! ping -qc1 -W1 $host > /dev/null; do echo -n "?" sleep 0.2 count=$(( count - 1 )) done echo ssh ${host} ret=$? if [ $ret = 0 ]; then exit 0 elif [ $ret = 255 ]; then sleep 0.5 fi echo -n "!" done

Looking through a nice blog by Andreas Schilling, I found this classic linked:



It catches very well why we're here, and perhaps why you are reading this blog.
Also, if you are mentoring in GSoC or Season of KDE this year, remind yourself what motivates you and your students, both. We all want to make the world a better place.

The results are in.  The Kubuntu Council is selected from among and by Kubuntu members.  There are six council members.  Each serves a two year term, so we elect half the council each year.  The winners are:

• Philip Muskovac (yofel)
• Rohan Garg (shadeslayer)
• Valorie Zimmerman (valorie)

Congratulations and welcome.  All three are first time council members.

The Kubuntu Council is the governing body of Kubuntu. The Kubuntu Council has three primary roles:

• Approve development plans for future Kubuntu releases
• Approve Kubuntu membership applications
• Resolve disputes within the Kubuntu project

Fortunately, we had our own mini vUDS today so we’ve now got a good idea what we want to have the new council approve.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #317 for the week May 13 – 19, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Announcing the Ubuntu Billboard Photo Contest
• Ubuntu Developer Summit 13.05 Closing Plenary and Track Summaries
• Ubuntu Open Week for Raring: Almost Here!
• Ubuntu Stats
• Getting the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit to 1.0
• Raring Party in Barcelona
• Daniel Holbach: Our Community Website
• Canonical Design Team: Ubuntu.com update
• Jono Bacon: Video Demo of Unity 8 on Mir and on a Galaxy Nexus
• The Fridge: Gandi now offers discounts for Ubuntu Members
• Canonical Design Team: System Settings for Ubuntu Phone
• Xubuntu: Looking towards Xubuntu 13.10
• Jono Bacon: Dogfooding the Ubuntu Phone: My (Early) Experience
• Ringtail from scratch
• Exploring Ubuntu Touch, the other Linux OS for your phone
• Google Glass rooted and hacked to run Ubuntu live at Google I/O
• What to Expect from Unity in Ubuntu 13.10
• In The Blogosphere
• Other Articles of Interest
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security for 10.04, 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04
• And much more!

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
• Paul White
• John Kim
• Benjamin Kerensa
• David Morfin
• Amber Graner
• The Alpaca Herder
• Jim Connett
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Since Jack was born my music has taken something of a back seat. Recently I got the itch to write a new song and here is my first metal tune since he was born. It is an instrumental named after his onesie with chimp feet. I wanted to enjoy writing a song that spins around a little bit without the need to make it radio-length. As such it weighs in at just under 7 1/2 minutes. Anyone want to make a music video for it.

I wrote and recorded this in my home studio and played the guitars and bass; drums are programmed this time around. Licensed as CC-BY-SA.

Download It Here

It’s been a manically busy few weeks so I’m not going to write much today, just share some photos from some of the engagement sessions that I’ve photographed recently. In no particular order.

Rachel and Dan are getting married later this year in Cambridge. We went to a nature reserve near Basingstoke for their photo session.

Sarah and Marcus are getting married next month. For their photo session we revisited the site of their first date, and where Marcus had proposed. Right there on that very bench!

Andrew and Callum are getting married this week. When I went into their flat and saw the rows of Doctor Who DVDs on their shelves I knew we were going to get along. We went to a Doctor Who location for this photo session.

Lucy and James got married at the Tithe Barn in Petersfield, but we went to the Queen Elizabeth Country Park for their engagement photo session. The morning sun poured through the mist and created some rather special lighting.

Pin It

In just nine years, Ubuntu has become one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world with millions of users and a thriving community. Ever wondered what all the fuss is about? How have we achieved such a great feat in such a short space of time? Here’s where you can find out. Ubuntu Open Week is a week of IRC tuition and Q+A sessions all about getting involved in the rock-and-roll world that is the Ubuntu community. We organise this week for the beginning of a new release cycle to help new contributors get involved.

Ubuntu Open Week takes place in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions), on May 20th-21st, from 13 to 18 UTC each day. We will be having people from different teams in, such as the Quality team, the Development team, the News team, and more! We are also going to have an “Ask Mark!” session with Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu Community founder!

During the “Ask Mark!” session, community members are invited to ask Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl) questions about the Ubuntu project. You will ask your questions in #ubuntu-classroom-chat with the prefix QUESTION: and philipballew will be selecting specific questions to pass along to Mark in the main #ubuntu-classroom channel.

To check out the full schedule and learn more about the event, visit the Ubuntu Open Week page on the Ubuntu wiki (we’re finishing to nail the schedule!)

We hope to see you there! But if not, as always, logs will be available after each session, and linked to the schedule at the end of each day.

I've got a project going to utilize Salesforce.com api over json and oauth rather than soap. Today I uploaded the package to the cheeseshop in hopes to pull in some interest from the community.

Right now the library contains authorization over OAuth 1.0a and client methods for retrieving basic Account, Case, and Asset information. My goal is to be api complete by the end of the year.

I would love to have contributors join the project in order to shape this young project into a well documented, tested, and easy to use library. As far as I can tell there isn't another python library like this that doesn't utilize SOAP for its endpoints.

Using the library is pretty straight forward, currently, I have 2 scripts that provide a simple way to authorize yourself and communicate with the endpoints.

sf-exchange-auth provides a local ssl enabled web server for going through the OAuth process and storing your token/secret.

sf-cli provides some arguments for pulling in rudimentary account and case information. Usage documentation is provided for this script.

The current focus is to stick to the YAGNI principles and utilize OO when it makes sense. This may or may not be the way to go so I am open to ideas and patches :D.

You can currently install python-salesforce through pip

$ pip install python-salesforce

The project page is located at

http://python.salesforce.astokes.org

Looking forward to hearing from you.

I've got a project going to utilize Salesforce.com api over json and oauth rather than soap. Today I uploaded the package to the cheeseshop in hopes to pull in some interest from the community.

Right now the library contains authorization over OAuth 1.0a and client methods for retrieving basic Account, Case, and Asset information. My goal is to be api complete by the end of the year.

I would love to have contributors join the project in order to shape this young project into a well documented, tested, and easy to use library. As far as I can tell there isn't another python library like this that doesn't utilize SOAP for its endpoints.

Using the library is pretty straight forward, currently, I have 2 scripts that provide a simple way to authorize yourself and communicate with the endpoints.

sf-exchange-auth provides a local ssl enabled web server for going through the OAuth process and storing your token/secret.

sf-cli provides some arguments for pulling in rudimentary account and case information. Usage documentation is provided for this script.

The current focus is to stick to the YAGNI principles and utilize OO when it makes sense. This may or may not be the way to go so I am open to ideas and patches :D.

You can currently install python-salesforce through pip

$ pip install python-salesforce

The project page is located at

http://python.salesforce.astokes.org

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Jono has written a very good post on his blog about respect in the community. I agree with the importance of respect in a community. It was also important to clarify that having different opinions or perspectives are not a sign of disrespect and are very important in a community even if consent cannot always be found. That is life, but not issuing different perspectives will disadvantage a community.

However, respect is a two-directional proposition. It is difficult to maintain respect, if every time there is a disagreement and passion creates tension, it is the fault of the community. In particular the vast differences in power create different points of breaking points and hence it sometimes may be far too easy to make comparisons on an equal level, or use objective tests to try to rationalise or use relativism. Pontifications of cult leaders rarely lead to respect, more often it is rather dissension or fear that are the result. This post is not supposed to in any way contradict the points Jono made in his blog post, but rather add another perspective to it.

This week's episode is brief and is the first after the close of the production suspension. A rough transcript is presented below for the avoidance of doubt.

Download here (MP3) (ogg) (FLAC), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.

And we're back...

Welcome to the Burning Circle. The production suspension has now concluded. For release on Monday, May 20th, this is episode 113.

I have sent to the e-mail list and posted elsewhere a notes update to bring everybody up to speed as to what is going on. I will not reiterate it here. If you need a link to it you will be able to find such in Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter 317. You are subscribed to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, aren't you?

We've had three folks attempt to join our community. I have disapproved two already and one remains in the pool. As a rule of thumb, I do ask that if I e-mail you that you please respond to me within a week. Within that amount of time, even a postcard can reach me via the United States Postal Service. Two people seeking to join did not contact me within a week's time and after multiple e-mails greeting them. One person remains in the queue with four day left to say something even if it is to tell me to go away. As a local community we have to be about more than just collecting a stylized Ohio flag logo on your Launchpad page. My biggest fear is that that has been the case a couple hundred times already.

We're heading into the Saucy Salamander cycle. We're way, way too quiet across the state. We have a mailing list. We have an IRC channel. We have a voicemail drop box to contact the leader. We need to speak up more as a community.

From the south shores of Lake Erie in the border port community of Ashtabula Township, this program has been brought to you over the facilities of the Internet Archive and Ubuntu Ohio by Erie Looking Productions. Our producer, Gloria "The Half Million Dollar Woman" Kellat, remains on medical leave. Our owner and engineer is Mike Kellat. I am the head writer, Stephen Michael Kellat. This program is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 United States license.

Thank you for joining us.

There may not be a native solution, but Google Music All Access is available in Ubuntu 13.04 today as a web app.

Turn On Notifications

To fully enjoy the Google music experience, notifications should be present. I am only going to turn on notifications within Chrome but you may explore a more intimate integration at this webupd8 blog post.

The first step is to load Google Music using the Chrome browser. I am using the beta version 27.0.1453.81. Press the setting button located in the upper right quadrant of the browser window and select Music Labs.

Find Desktop Notifications from the list and click enable.

Add Google Music as a Web App

Although you may run this directly from the Chrome browser, the secret to an enhanced user experience is adding Google Music as a Ubuntu web app. For the details on how to accomplish this see; Ubuntu – A Replacement for Chrome OS.

Enroll In Google Music All Access

You can stream music in your library to any device or computer via a browser on which you’re signed in. You can also download music in your library to any authorized device or computer. You can authorize up to a total of ten (10) devices or computers at any one time. At this time, only two Google accounts per computer can be used to add music with the Google Play Music Manager.

Click the Try It Free for 30 Days button to begin your registration. For your awareness a list of Authorized devices will be displayed for your consideration and you will be prompted to enter credit card payment info.

Start Playing Music

Ubuntu Integration

Enjoy : )

The post Ubuntu 13.04 – Enable Google Music All Access appeared first on j-Baer.