The PUSK 0.9.7 is now available

What ? PUSK ? What’s that ? This is the ProLiant USB Setup Key

This is a USB key you can now use to capture a hardware configuration of your HP ProLiant server (tested with G7 and Gen8). For that you just have to boot on the USB key and type “capture” at the boot prompt. Configuration is stored on the key, with the operation logs.

Then you can modify the conf files, or just use the single one we provide for what is really specific in a server (iLO credentials and IP conf), and redeploy that hardware configuration on a new server. For that just boot the new server on the key, and voilà !!

More over to deploy, you don’t need a keyboard, mouse, screen attached to the server, so if you are working in a place where your server is just electrically and networkly connected, that sufficient, and at the end the server will shutdown once the gardware configuration is done. Just restart it, and start controlling it remotely from the iLO do perform whatever further installation/customization you need to do.

So this is an easy way to have an operator perform the operation, doesn’t need Linux knowledge, nor platform knowledge. He just has to send the logs back to the dev team in case a problem occurs so they can debug.

And more over, thanks to HP, this is all GPLv2 Free Software

Now the important part, where to download it ?

The full 0.9.7 key is available at ftp://ftp.project-builder.org/PUSK/pusk-0.9.7.img
Just use dd to burn it onto your key and boot with it (WARNING: default mode is to deploy !)

For those of you who want to hack on the code, the entry point is at http://pusk.project-builder.org/browser/trunk and the Wiki (Home page) at http://pusk.project-builder.org

Hope you’ll find it useful. Let us know what you think of it.

An intermediate 2.1.5 mindi version

It’s not very often that I separate mindi from mondo in the publication of releases. But this time it was needed as I had a customer who suffered from bugs that were only needing a mindi realease, and I thought it would help many other users ,so here you are !

Mindi 2.1.5 is there, and is principally solving kernel support detection for the type of initrd possible (solves an abort of mindi on RHEL3/4), and also reduces the number of error messages when dealing with links containing more than 2 references to .. Should help with some recent reports.

Also I had a report that the -H option and RESTORE keyword were not completely without interaction, so this is now solved as well.

Finally, this version supports better HP ProLiant Gen8 and future platforms by also using hp-rcu and hp-fm tools.

Now available on ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org for more than 120 distribution tuples ! And for those who ask why I do that: first because I like it, then because I have the tools to do it, and also because I do have users who are using Fedora 7, RHEL 3 or even Red Hat 6.2.

Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

After a nice welcome breakfast, Aurélien Bompard started by presenting the Fedora distribution.

He did a great job especially expalining how easy it was to become a Fedora maintainer, even if a comparison to Debian revealed that it’s much less different that what people may think (it also takes time to become a packager able to modify most distro packages) and I know by experience that the Fedora packagers are really picky (sometimes for not so good reasons) with new contributions.

After that I talked about HP and Linux distributions. I used in fact the standard HP marketing presentation of the company as a starter (modified of course to suit my needs and include more penguins !) in order to explain the span of our activities, our relationship with communities including distributions, announced that HP will even soon provide firmware for ProLiant servers under a package format (rpm and deb), the fact that HP doesn’t see Linux demand for desktop/laptop on the consumer market (no, it’s not just a price issue that would make Linux more appealing in that case as I justified) but that we do support Linux on some enterprise desktops/laptops. Hopefully this was useful and/or new to some of the audience.

Then Dodji Seketeli made the type of talk making you believe that you could contribute to gcc ! Of course, when he details how much time it took him to add some of the features of the next stable version, you know you can’t ! Well I at least Anyway lots of good news and features that make that future version 4.8 expected soon.

That conclude our morning sessions, and it was then time to eat !! Especially as we had a great buffet waiting for us as you can see:

In order to avoid a sleepy afternoon, we started right after by a round table with 7 people (!), that I had the pleasure to chair. With a representative of each distribution (Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Embedded) and a Microsoft representative, you could expect blood and swords fight ! Not at all, I was surprisingly happy that the elements were clearly exposed, each representative defending their own work rather than criticizing, and finding ways to propose more future joint work. Of course, some subjects such as LSB/FHS lead to more debate, but very constructive and I really enjoyed this time slot as a way to show that differences are an added value ! It was also the opportunity for me to meet with Colin Guthrie and Frédérc Crozat, which I had never met before. These distros should be happy to have such representatives defending them (and the others too of course ) Finally if you have ideas to share to improve cross-distribution work , consider joining the mailing listdedicated to his topic and start sharing your ideas.

Then it was time again for the remaining presentations. The first was Lucas Nussbaum. Long time Debian Developer, (he is even running for the Debian Project Leader now, vote for him !) he made a convincing picture of the Debian ecosystem, the numerous Web sites that contributors can create to enhance the distribution with stats, infos, Ubuntu correlations, … As usual, Debian appears as a very mature distribution, with a strong Governance, being perl friendly… If I had to change I may well become a debianers. But isn’t it because of the pres, as the morning I was a fedorian

The next speaker was a long time Linux enthousiast Pierre Ficheux. In fact back when it was Minitel time (not 2.0) I used his xtel program !! Pierre made a presentation (in english but with the accent ) around embedded Linux distributions, presenting various way to tailor one for your device (he was using a Raspberry Pi) depending whether you use an Ubuntu, a Yocto generated one or a pure OpenEmbedded linux one. Definitely a good idea to explore for my Pi !

And then we had the lightnings talks. Aurélien Bompard was there again for HyperKitty. Too bad it’s devoted to mailan, as I think Sympa would also benefit from such a work, as their archive management (at least on the latest versions I used) could be improved.

I came then again on stage for a project-builder.org presentation (building cross-distro packages for upstream projects) and made a short demo which I think is explaining much more than my slides, so I plan on using it more in the future !

After me, Eric Leblond explained how his upstream project (ulogd2) wasn’t picked up correclty by most distributions and asked for help to improce that.

And final speaker was Nicolas Vérité who made a panel on all mobile Linux distributions, recommending to follow closely Tizen for the future as the main force in this area.

Too bad it was already over. Anne closed the session and I’d like to thank her for the invitation and the perfect organization of this first cross-distributions vent as a real success. Well done and see you next year hopefully !

Meeting at Linux.conf.au in Canberra

I’ll soon be lucky to be able to be in a plane for some 20 hours in order to reach down under and be in Linux.conf.au in Canberra ! It will be my second time in Australia after my previous presentation on MondoRescue in Sydney in 2007. This time I’ll organize the cross-distributions MiniConf on Tuesday the 29th of January 2013.

And I’m so happy to have fantastic speakers such as Bdale Garbee or Monty Taylor among others ! I anticipate it will be a great Miniconf. So fell free to come and participate, you’ll have the best people to give you answers

And as usual, if you want to talk about packaging, disaster recovery, open source or early music, feel free to come by and talk with me. I look forward discovering another part of thies great country in two weeks.

Meet at HP Discover next week

Hello,

I’ll be at the major HP event (HP Discover) next week in Frankfurt, Germany from the 4th to the 6th of December, delivering 2 sessions, and attenting some others which look very promising.

You may find me on the Red Hat booth or the Intel booth, if you want to talk about code and projects (MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, UUWL), Architecture, FLOSS Governance, FLOSS @ HP or in general. Will be happy to exchange with you around these topics.

You may find more details (in french) on the sessions I’ll be delivering on the event blog site.

See you there !

Bdale Garbee has been HP’s best Open Source Ambassador

As announced by Kirk Bresniker during its keynote at LinuxCon this week, Bdale Garbee has left HP yesterday.

When he warned me in July of his willingness to leave, in order to have more time for his family, his own FLOSS projects (FreedomBox, Debian, …), I really was shocked and had a very bad night. It’s difficult for me to imagine Open Source at HP without him to represent it.

Bdale was IMHO our best Ambassador in the FLOSS community. He has a large ring of relationships in a large set of projects, and knows personality lots of key FLOSS personalities, some of them being even friends. He was giving a lot of credibility to HP around our FLOSS activities, and was listen internaly from both our internal community members, as well as our management, allowing our community to pass supportive FLOSS messages to it.

I had my first interaction with Bdale at HP in 2001. At that time Bruce Perens was the HP FLOSS representative (even he also was a big FLOSS personality, I preferred when Bdale took over the role), and as he couldn’t make the NordU 2002 Keynote, he was proposing that either Bdale or me did it !! As Bdale wasn’t available, I was the one replacing both him and Bruce !! Believe me, speaking of Open Source, Linux and freedom in Finland during a keynote session after a couple of months at HP was a bit stressing ! I still remember it. But that was great. Side note, if any event is willing to host me as a keynote speaker, I think I could do a much better job today

In 2002, Bdale was elected Debian Project Leader. He was the first HP employee leading this project. I then had the pleasure to meet with him face to face (well with my size, I can not really look at Bdale easily !) and I really was looking forward each time for this type of non-virtual meeting, as it was for me an opportunity to learn more on Open Source at HP and at large. Which was the case during various Fosdem, LinuxCon or our own internal TES. As I’ve always been impressed by his profound knowledge of this ecosystem, and the deep thoughts he’s able to have on various areas making this IT sector.

That’s why I built his application form so he could become Lutèce d’Or (personality of the year) during the event Paris, Capitale du Libre. That was my contribution back to his incredible work for FLOSS. But not the only one, as he told me once that MondoRescue saved once a critical Debian server he was hosting. Hopefully, you’ll continue to use

Bdale is one of the people I admire in the IT industry with Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall (In the music, I also have my heroes such as Gustav Leonhardt, Jordi Savall and her wife Montserrat Figueras, Jean Belliard or Frans Brüggen). I’m sure our paths will cross again very soon, and I hope our frienship will be reinforced by regular chats, mails and face to face meetings during FLOSS events. And in the mean time, I wish to him all the best for his new activities, that will benefit to all of us, and for his new life 2.0 !

Hopefully HP will find other FLOSS representatives. Corporations always say that anybody is replaceable. I disagree. Everybody brings a unique touch. And here, for sure, it will never be the same. You’ll be missed.

All the best Bdale for your future, and hope rockets flied this week-end

FLOSS governance news

While at LinuxCon in San Diego, the SPDX working group of the Linux Foundation announced its 1.1 version of its specification. Quite an achievement, and probably the start of its real adoption by Open Source projects … providing enough tool do support it, and help projects in their identification tasks. I hope lots of large FLOSS consumers (HP included) will start contributing SPDX descriptions to upstream projects, helping them adopting it as it brings value on both side.

And one way to help will probably the support of this 1.1 SPDX spec by FOSSology in the future. For now the news around the tool is that a public instance is available, hosted by the Universty of Nebraska. This is a good news for Open Source projects that will be able to assess easily their licenses with it, without having the hassle to install and maintain their own ! Hopfully, more forges (as what OW2 has done) will also provide that service to the projects they’re incubating.

Just be aware that the code you’ll upload to that instance will be available for everybody to see, so do not post non-FLOSS code there, if you want it to remain secret ! If you’re developing closed source software, then install you’re own FOSSology instance instead !

Time to finish my FOSSology presentation update for tomorrow’s talk !

Presenting FOSSology at LinuxCon, San Diego next week

I always find strange to be accepted as a speaker to LinuxCon on a subject for which I’m much less an expert than the other ones I proposed for which I’m leading the projects ! It happened last year for the EMEA event, and same stuff again this year for the US one.

But I won’t be criticizing here, as it’s my first possibility to visit the US west coast, and also my first time as a speaker to LinuxCon US so Champagne !! So I’ll be talking about FOSSology, the HP sponsored GPL Licenses analyzer tool.

So if you happen to be around, and want to discuss abour FLOSS, MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, HP and Open Source, or something else such as early music, then feel free to come and talk. Well I’m sure you won’t come to see me, won’t you, but once you’re there to see the stars, just come and say hello

About to publish project-builder.org 0.12.1

When I looked at the date of the current project-builder.org current stable version, I had a shock ! It has been nearly a year since I published that version. I should not stay that long without providing updates But you know what it is, you always think that you should still add that latest cool feature, and then that other, + fix this problem, … and you end up one year later with a great development version, but still no public stable one so others could benefit from your work.

So it’s time ! Especially as I have committed a lot of patches from an HP colleague, Eric Anderson, who is using the tool (and in its devel version !) to support packaging projects he is working on for HP. So I worked hard since the 8th of May to integrate what he has made available on github, since he got HP’s approval through the OSRB. And I have integrated I think more than 90% of his enhancements, which now will make 0.12.1 even more appealing than before.

But I’m not as a good guy as some think Some of the patches seemed strange to me, or could have an impact which I wasn’t completely sure of, so there is still some work Eric did, that has been left appart for the moment. Sorry for that, but I’m a slow guy, using this project on a daily basis, so I really need to be convinced before accepting a patch. But I was convinced by a lot I’ll now contact him back through the project mailing list, and see how we can work on these remaining points for 0.12.2 so he has a tool working much better for him. Among the nice stuff Eric has brought is clearly a much improved GIT support (read working !), and Debian/Ubuntu support as well (as he is using them natively). He also added support for stopping with the first error, or not as this is an option. Plus lots of improvements all around.

And he will also beneft from my own modifications, which hopefully improved the tool as well ! The last one, being with the configuration file management, now fully done in memory, instead of re-reading all conf file each time (which could also have some advantages, but speed improvement is what I was looking for here). In particular, in this version, the documentation has been improved a lot and should help more beginners. I have added a new getconf option to help following the value of configuration items (useful as pb uses lots of config files !), checkssh to verify what has been delivered on the repository, wrt what should have been, cleanssh to clean up the remote repository for test versions. A new -t option has been added to create local packages more quickly (when only the local distro will be used). Patches support has also been extended to .deb distributions. I have also introduced a new script, pbmkbm, which is aimed at creating customized boot media (project-builder.org make boot media), that will be the basis of an evolution of mindi in the MondoRescue project (doesn’t work as of now, and more on that later on). Some enhancement requests and bug fixes have also been done (#99, #585, #93, #522, #103, #105, new distro support for Fedora 15 and 16, Ubuntu 11.10, 12.04, OpenSuSE 11.4, 12.1 at least). #101 is the last on the list for 0.12.1 and as soon as it’s mostly done, I’ll publish it. Promised !

Stay tuned as usual

UUWL aka the Unix to Unix Wrapper LIbrary is now available

I recently receive the approval from the HP OpenSource Review Board so that we can publish a new HP and Intel sponsored Open Source project called the UUWL aka the Unix to Unix Wrapper Library, now available at UUWL.project-builder.org.

The published code is a first version providing help to migrate C code from Solaris to Linux. That’s a first step in this project. The target is to augment that with more code porting helper functions, which have not yet being developed, and also to target next other Unices such as AIX. As well we think this library may well become a must have for Linux distributions, so they may integrate it as they do with the GNU LibC, so that Linux could become the most porting friendly platform.

For the moment, only the source code and build process is available. I’ve started to work on the packaging with project-builder.org, and soon multiple packages will be available for various Linux distributions in order to ease installation and usage. We also need to release more documentation, use autoconf/automake, … It’s just a start. But as such we thought it would be worth sharing and try to build a new community interested by this topic.

We are interested by getting first feedback around this project. And if you have porting experience, you’re also welcome to join and share it with us so we could improve the UUWL and make it more useful for everybody. It’s released under a dual license, both OSI approved, the LGPLv2 and the MIT license, so it could be used in multiple context.