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 the first Distro Recipes

I’ve been kindly invited for the first Distro Recipes event in Paris the 4th and 5th of April.

As I have an internal HP meeting on the 4th, I’ll be only available at the end of that day, but will present on the 5th how Hardware manufacturers work with Linux distributions, giving the example of HP. I’ll also monitor a round table aound “Linux distributions: differences and commonalities” where we will try to have polite discussions about what makes a distribution unique, and what is instead worth sharing by collaborating. Finally I’ll also present during the lightning talks “Project-Builder.org: packaging for multi-OS Open Source Projects“

So won’t have that too much time outside of presentations, as you can see, but would be happy anyway to meet with MondoRescue or Project-Builder.org or HP/Linux users and talk with them.

Anyway a great event to be in, as the list of speakers is really interesting, all majors distros being represented, and for sure very interesting new contacts to make, and hopefully the curiosity to discover these other distros that you don’t use Come for the same reasons, and see you there !

MondoRescue 3.0.3 is finally out

I know. It’s been a long process. And I’m not even fully satisfied with the results, as we do have unresolved bugs in this version. But as it also fixes some critical others that were expecting for a long time (3+ months), I didn’t want to delay more the release of this version.

So here it is. mondo 3.0.3, mindi 2.1.4 and mindi-busybox 1.18.5-3 are now availble from the master ftp server. And as given in the announce, most of the distributions (nearly 100 of them) also have packages ready for use. Once more couldn’t do it without project-builder.org

The detailed change logs are available for mindi, mindi-busybox and mondo.

Among the main fixes brought by this version, a much better support of SLES 10, SLES 11 SP1, SLES11 SP2, especially for LVM and device exclusion, grub, keyboard.

I also received very, very valuable contributions from users, which helps producing a better version of course, and reduce the time of the resolution of the problem in the upstream version. Thanks again for helping ! Including on some very old bugs. And Victor being one of the most prolific.

There are even some new features such as the support of swaplabel or the inclusion of all tools part of minimal.conf now in the first boot part.

As said earlier, some bugs ar not fixed yet. I passed most of the week trying to fix the automatic mode where CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn’t work. I added support in 3.0.3 of an inittab file, but whatever the conf I use fo now, it doesn’t trigger a reboot when using the magic key or sending it from the KVM monitor. So be warned and use with care. I’ll report on the busybox ML as I still have the issue with 1.20.2, and try to get help from this community. Could well trigger the release of a new mindi-busybox (and maybe mindi) soon after this one.

In the serie of un-fixed bugs for lack of time for this time are some that a user reported as more important to fix soon:

• Ticket #628: 3.0.2-1 Fail to Restore from External Hard Disk – This is a very big issue here.
• Ticket #641: Specifying the Same Backup to NFS via CLI=Success via GUI=Fail – Although it is possible to work around this problem it is preventing the creation of exceptional backups by users with little knowledge of Mondo. A fix will be most welcome and will present a more appropriate impression of Mondo.
• Ticket #640: mondo.tmp.xxxxx & mondo.scratch.xxxxx Issues – This is not a critical issue. A fix will help with backup management and housekeeping tasks.

I globally agree these are also important to fix (even if less than Ticket 627). I also think we need to work on Ticket 656 as well. I’d like to get your comments as well in order to prioritize the fixes in the next version, as I can’t work full time on MondoRescue, so need to choose where to put my efforts.

busybox fix while preparing MondoRescue for its 3.0.3 version

While preparing the new version of MondoRescue (test packages on their way for final remarks before having next stable version), I was trying to make a missing version of mindi-busybox for a colleague still using RHEL 3. I quickly realized that my promise to make it (hoping to just type pb -p mondorescue -m rhel-3-i386,rhel-3-x86_64 -r tags/3.0.2 cms2vm) was not so easy to perform

It happens that the version we use (1.18.5) doesn’t compile out of the box for such an old beast as a RHEL 3 with it’s 2.4 kernel. So I had to make some adaptations to the code, in order to have it compile for RHEL3, but still working for newest versions. At least, I have something which seems to be working for RHEL 3, RHEL 6 and Fedora 18, so now I’m building for all my supported distros which now are 120+ and will probably take up to mid day tomorrow.

For those of you interested, had issues with the main Makefile, statfs.h (HAVE_SYS_STATFS_H shouldn’t be set in RHEL 3 case) and a missing BLKGETSIZE64 macro, and the corresponding patch is at: http://trac.mondorescue.org/changeset/3085

With that I’m also trying to fix 2 remaining bugs (http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/627 and
http://trac.mondorescue.org/ticket/651) which should have no other impact. The first one is still not fully tested as corrected.

My goal is to publish the next stable version 3.0.3 of MondoRescue this week-end, for my birthday

Finally time to publish pb 0.12.2

As you can see with the few messages I had time to post on this blog, the end of 2012 start of 2013 has been pretty busy, and I’m late in delivering the 2 projects I’m leading. So this week, I decided it was time to make a 0.12.2 version of pb, and make it available. Was asked by my colleagues of FOSSology, specially to add Fedora 18 support, so I also build my VMs to make packages on this distro.

BTW, a bit of ranting for Fedora once more: no perl by default , and no ifconfig nor route command either which is breaking MondoRescue of course, and I guess tons of other software around. These guys don’t care about past, but don’t provide compatibility tools either !! So I’ll have to make new patches, just to do the same as what was done, but with another command again. Not to speak of systemd which I still have issues to deal with That doesn’t make stuff go faster !

Anyway, the version is now out, no official bugs fixed, but a lot of small stuff here and there which were desrving a release. No time to test Fedora 17/18 VE yet, so you’ll have to do that yourself if you want. I also had a look at virsh usage in combination with pb, and it’s again not as easy as it could seem to be. Especially port redirection I’m easily using by launching qemu-kvm manually with the -redir or hostfwd option doesn’t seem to be possible with the user mode network through virsh (neither manager nor CLI). Will have to post on their ML to see how they do that, if they can !

And MondoRescue has been very late. I really need to publish a verion, but I still have some blocking bugs I really would like to get rid of: CTRL+ALT+DEL not working anymore during restore, some LVM issues on RHEL, some grub issues on SLES… Hopefully at the end of next week I’ll have made progresses.

Of course patches are much easy to integrate, but I receive more bug reports than them

And also back to preparing the HP internal TES event, Solutions Linux confs, submitting to LinuxCon, working on an FLOSS ITIL stack, learning more OpenStack, looking at Intel’s TXT…. so many things I’d like to do or learn and will never have time to ! Maybe at least I’ll talk about that another time.

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 !

Availability of the beta of MondoRescue 3.0.3 (and mindi 2.1.4)

We have had a long work on this version to fix some issues reported by a customer on SLES 11 SP2 particularly, which will benefit all MondoRescue users. The support of that last version of SLES is now fully working, and it allowed us to fix issues around LVM, /dev/dm-* devices and grub boot loader re-installation. A lot of other bugs have been fixed during this version (some 23), and I really encourage you to test it and report your findings on our mailing-list.

Before the final publication, I’d like to fix the issues encountered by Fedora 17 users, but I’ve not neen able to reproduce it correctly on my side up to now, and I stil l have to work on the latest log files reported to me in order to understand what is creating the issue some users are seeing.

But if no blocking point is found before end of week, and if my tests are successful, I think we’ll have a good 3.0.3/2.1.4 couple that I’d like to push as stable. Fedora fixes could then be done in a later mindi version (as this is what is mainly creating a problem now).

Thanks for your patches, support and now tests !

Mindi 2.1.3 is now available

Ok, so before 1 week in my other life (amateur early music musician), I want to publish this new update of mindi only. It fixes 4 minor bugs that have been reported, mostly with fixes, and that should make MondoResuce more robust again. To be used with mondo 3.0.2.

This version brings:

• Fix #621 by avoiding to handle iso9660 and bind FS type from fstab.
• Fix a bug in mindi where regular expressions were used with grep without the -E option
• Fix #614 SLES kbd issue
• Improves Mageia 2 support which needs .ko.xz modules detection

All packages have been made and are available at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org
So happy disaster recovery !