Time to Meet at HP ExpertOne Technology & Solutions Summit !

For those of you working for an HP value added reseller (VAR) and attending the HP ExpertOne Technology & Solutions Summit on Barcelona from the 2nd to the 6th of February, feel free to meet during one of the session I’ll (co-)deliver:

• UEFI: what, why, when, how and the rest Breakout 101 – Wed 2014-02-04 9:30-10:20 AM
• HP Helion OpenStack in action – Breakout 124 – Wed 2014-02-04 2:00-2:50PM
• HP ProLiant Gen9 value add on Linux – Breakout 99 – Thu 2014-02-05 9:30-10:20 AM
• HP ProLiant Gen9 value add on Linux (Hands-on Lab) – Lab 16 – Thu 2014-02-05 2:00-3:50 PM
• UEFI Hands-On Labs – Lab 19 – Thu 2014-02-05 4:30-6:20 PM
• Running Enterprise Linux distributions on HP ProLiant Gen9 – Breakout 100 – Fri 2014-02-06 9:30-10:20 AM

And you should be able to meet the Geeks on Wednesday afternoon, myself included.

For those of you wondering why project-builder.org and MondoRescue versions are not published more regularly, that gives you a hint ;-) Not speaking of the next event in March, TES, where I’m part of the Event team this time.

See you there to talk of these subjects or something else as you see fit. I’m around the whole week.

MondoRescue 3.2.0: last beta before publishing

I’m probably far from being a good project leader. The lack of time is one of the reason, but I think I could do better anyway, as I was particularly quiet these 2 last months. So I use that time, where I’m waiting before driving to the airport to give a status.

I was quiet, but still working on it as time permitted, and willing to solve the Fedora 18-20 support issues I had for a very long time now. And it seems that with the latest patches pushed this week, I’m good on that side. I’ve been able to do a full backup/restore of my Fedora 20 VM in automatic mode without issue ! That’s the first time, and was particularly happy that after 9 months of development around 3.2, I could achieve that. The other good news, is that it is still working fine for RHEL 6 e.g. as I also did a full cycle this week.

Ok, so life is nice. Well, as you know, nothing’s perfect ;-) So I still have an issue with RHEL 7. In fully automatic mode, eveything works fine, except that the restored VM doesn’t start due to an issue on the UUID in the initramfs.

I’ll test by recreating that initramfs after restore, and hopfully, dracut will do the job for me. But as I’ll be travelling in the US all next week, I thought it was good to publish a last beta before leaving, so that the community could also test and report what happens on other distros or on other configurations.

Note that very few other bugs have been fixed. I’m more interested for this first 3.2 version to have it work finally on all new systemd distros as much as I can, even if some features are still not fully working (see trac for details).

Compared to my last post on the subject, some points have been improved:

• the network stack is now launched as long as a network backup has been done originally, even if you boot from the ISO image directly, and not through PXE. You may still choose from where to restore afterwards, but at least network is up
• solve some /bin vs /usr/bin issues for pre-fedora 18 and systemd distros which were not working anymore (Cf: #741)
• fix for a lack of keyboard discovery
• fix some perl issues in some cases (Cf: #755)
• force LV creation which on RHEL7 now asks a question in case something was already there before (Cf: #753)
• Optimize modules list computation between mindi and restore init script and do not load modules list twice anymore
• Force generation of hardlinks for busybox to avoid package build problem on some distro with inexistant links at build time (recent SLES)
• Fix busybox 1.21.1 to support back old distributions such as RHEL3 and RHEL4 or SLES9 by avoiding usage of the struct tpacket_auxdata
• Fix isolinux.bin and ldlinux.c32 locations for recent Debian distro

So maybe even more has been fixed than I considered initially in fact. Anyway, I’ll try to avoid to stay so long without publishing new versions to test. It’s a promise, but will be difficult to keep so don’t hold your breath !

I’d appreciate that you provide feedback on the MondRescue mailing list, create trac entries (even if I know there are already a lot that would need to be solved sooner than later).

The goal is to publish 3.2.0 final before Christmas, and to work on a hopefully final 3.0.5 version backporting some of the previously mentionned fixes coded in 3.2 for those of you who prefer to stay on that branch, which will be maintained a bit in parallel as long as 3.2 is not tested more. I think that you’ve been patient with me, so I also have to be patient myself before more users adopt the new stable branch.

Hopefully you’ll get a new blog article for the announce in less than a month !

HP MyRoom on a 64 bits Linux

Well, HP is now promoting a new solution for webinars called HP MyRoom. And even if they provide rpm (and deb) packages, these are not working out of the box on my Mageia 64 bits distro, of course. That was already the case with HP Virtual Room previsouly.

But nothing you can’t make work, as long as you have the source don’t you ? So here is the receipe:

First install all the required dependencies that are not correctly mentioned in the rpm:

urpmi lib64xtst6 libxtst6 lib64xscrnsaver1 libxscrnsaver1 jpeg-devel lcms-devel lib64pulseaudio0 libpulseaudio0

Then add an additional library which was not even part of Mageia when I started this post ;-)
Get it from Cauldron where I uploaded it:

wget http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/x86_64/media/core/release/libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm
wget http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/i586/media/core/release/libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.i586.rpm
urpmi libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.x86_64.rpm libmng1-1.0.10-1.mga5.i586.rpm

Then finally download HP MyRoom for a 64 bits RPM system and install it with:

rpm -ivh --nodeps hpmyroom-10.0.0.0210.amd64.rpm

and launch it !

/usr/bin/hpmyroom

And now enjoy exchanging from Linux as well as from Lynx but without the hassle to use Windows ;-)

Bdale back home ;-)

I had the “primeur” of the information during LinuxCon US, but couldn’t share it till it was official. But as of today it is !

So…

$ ldapsearch -h ldap.hp.com -x -b "o=hp.com" -LLL "(cn=*garbee*)" | grep -iE 'uid:|status:'
uid: bdale.garbee.ii@hp.com
hpStatus: Active


Yes ! you’ve got it ! Bdale Garbee is back. And he is now a fellow, even if I can’t give a precise link to proove it … yet. Bdale will work in the CTO Office for Martin Fink. Well deserved !

I’m sure he will soon update his page to reflect this new status.

Welcome back home Bdale, and hopefully new opportunities to work together on Open Source and Linux activities ;-)

Speaking at LinuxCon EMEA 2014

I received confirmation and support for my travel at LinuxCon EMEA 2014 which will be in Düsseldorf, Germany from the 13th to the 15th of October. I’m pretty proud to have up to now presented in all the european LinuxCon events since 2011.

I’ll again animate a round table on FLOSS Governance. I’m now contacting potential panelists for this one and should announce them soon.

But I’ll also have a technical session in parallel on a subject I’m working on at the moment, and should get interest as it is docker related: Multi-OS Continuous Packaging with Docker and Project-Builder.org.

Ok, so now I need to go back to my source code to make it work and publish it before the conf don’t you think so ? :-)

Last day at LinuxCon NA 2014

Today the keynotes were dedicated to Openness and Hardware. The first was from a company, Makerbot, which spoke a lot about Openness, but that I saw more as trying to sell their 3D printers, rather then anything else :-( I even learned later from an attendee that they even tend to block innovation with their patents ! So maybe the LinuxFoundation should take care of not “giving” opportunity to such actors to speak to an Open Source audience if their state of mind is nearer from the closed source business. Having a community sharing 3D design doesn’t sound sufficient to me.

The second keynote was on the topic that even is 3D printing is such a hype at the moment, disallowed people still have a hard time finding useful prothesis, modern ones, les expensive ones, or building their own. I really encourage you to listen to Jonathan Kuniholm (the keynote doesn’t seem to be online, but TED provides one very similar). This was puzzling for me to see how few technology is helping people like him :-( So I think that if you have time, you should look at helping his initiative at openprosthetics.org/ rather than inventing yet another piece of software just because the existing one doesn’t happen to please you.

Finally we had the “usual” IBM keynote, showing how Linux on Power was great, and presenting the foundation built around it. But if you look at uses cases, you see that most of them are academics, where probably the hardware was given so it weakened the talk IMO. Of course, I’m working for a competitor, so I’m not completely neutral here. Anyway having a portable Linux is extremely important, but I think it will reveal its capabilities on x86 (well it has of course!) or ARM. It had on Itanium or Sparc or Power (Linux can enable them) but the problem is that market doesn’t want such high-end platforms anymore, as they were representing a closed approach even if that has changed since. Openness is what allows mass distribution today (in processors as those mentionned, or software as Android and hopefully Linux on the desktop ;-))

After the break, I passed my day in the UEFI mini-Summit. The goal was different from last year PlugFest during LinuxCon. Instead of targetting developers, the goal was to expain the technology to potential and existing Linux sysadmin or devops. And I think it went pretty well with regards to demystifying how UEFI works woith Linux, including SecureBoot and brought back the discussion at a technical level rather than an emotional one.

An introduction talk by Dong Wei, HP served as positioning the UEFI Forum, the various groups in it (with the inclusion of ACPI), the history of UEFI, current status, and helped put everybody at the same level.

After that we had a (always too short IMO) round table were the audience was given the possibility to ask questions to the panelists. And there were very tough questions asked around the usefulness of UEFI, the lockdown brough by SecureBoot, … and everytime clear and honets answers were given showing why UEFI is useful, why SecureBoot help increasing Linux security without restricting users possibilties and control over their platform. All in all a lot of myths were just addressed during that Q&A session which was really interactive.

After that, we had more formal presentations:

• UEFI Secure Boot – Strengthening the Chain of Trust – Jeff Bobzin, Insyde Software & Kevin Lane, HP
  This session was mainly about how Secureboot is working from a technology perspective, and the various solutions existing with Linux and its boot loaders to use it, benefit from it as it really increase security by providing a chain of trust from firmware up to the kernel+intrd booted, with either standard UEFI keys or its own ones.



• UEFI Test Tools for Linux Developers – Brian Richardson, Intel & Alex Hung, Canonical
  This session was on FWTS from Canonical which provides a UEFI firmware and ACPI test suite, used alot by manufacturers to check the conformity of their platform with the UEFI and ACPI specifications. Chipsec and LuvOS were also covered which provides other areas of test with regards to respectively security and an integrated Linux distribution calling all these tools and more, both developed by Intel.



• Building ARM Servers with UEFI and ACPI – Dong Wei, HP & Roy Franz, Linaro
  This session was to give a status on UEFI support for ARM architecture, and was pretty interesting for me as I had no clue on where we are on this domain. And it seems they are catching up with Intel Architecture now and should be at parity very soon. ACPI is still less advanced, but will be there for ARM servers as requested by customers, whereas device tree will probably remain what will be used on nn server platforms.



• Self-signing the Linux Kernel (the hobbyist approach) – Zach Bobroff, AMI
  
  This last session was IMHO the best of the serie, because it was demo oriented (and I like demos !) and more over, it just worked !! The goal was to show how to register its own key used to sign its own kernel with SecureBoot, and rebooting a machine with and without key loaded to demonstrate the increased security brought by that mechanism. Was very clear and illustrative of what was described during the first session of the mini-Summit by Jeff and Kevin. Zach did an excellent job explaining each step and provided great details on how all that works, and finally showed to the audience that we shouldn’t be afraid of the feature, because we have the possibility with the shim bootloade to use our own keys without issue.

You can listen to all these presentations at the UEFI web site. And I think it’s worth doing so for those who still have questions on the SecureBoot topic, as it will enlighten you and remove and barrier you may still see there.

The event was then over, so it was time to benefit from my speaker gift, which was the possibility to use a boat and have a cruise around Chicago, which I did with Dong and it was a very good idea from the organizers to offer that gift. Hope the pictures will give ou a good idea of how we enjoyed it.

Second day at LinuxCon NA 2014

Well I missed the first keynote this morning, not on purpose, even it was a Cisco one ;-) As Chicago climate was “foggy” I think I didn’t missed anything.

The second I didn’t want to miss was made by Solomon Hykes on Docker (which, as he rightly said, is the word you can’t miss on the Internet nowadays)
His topic was Docker explained through the ground reasons of its creation perspective. It was interesting to see his ability to step back and have a clear look on all the ways people are using his software, identify them through clear use cases, and looking forward on what his community still has to do in order to cover all the use cases he mentionned. I was pretty impressed by his vision, his humble but decided attitude, his optimism. I think our FLOSS ecosystem as clearly a new star here.

And that’s probably among the reasons why the project is so successful. As I wanted to share my my HP colleagues how much I was impressed, I asked to him after the keynote whether he would accept to be one of our TuXTalk speaker for our FLOSS Profession, and to my surprise he accepted right away. Staying as accessible as that is for me another proof we have a new great flagship thinker. I really look forward listening more lenghtly to his thoughts and of course working with docker as such a clever person has for sure created a clever project ! My revelation of the week.

The last Keynote was from Dirk Hohndel from Intel. He stand up instead of the original Intel speaker who had an issue, and didn’t reused his material but used the 20 minutes of the talk to freely talk about two subjects: IoT and the Cloud (that being warned the day before).

He made a pretty funny talk, gathering easily the devs and devops in the room saying that “The Internet was made of things way before marketers get hold of it” or putting emphasis on us as a community rather than on corporations, or ditching the wireless network of the vent (which BTW was flacky indeed). He used that trick to made it easier for him to have adhesion of the audience, which he got. But at the end he passed few messages: one around the need of an Enterprise Group for OpenStack which was created, and another one around Intel promoting a new open standard and open source implementation for discovering and managing devices part of the IoT. More at openinterconnect.org. But don’t expect too much, as there is only 5 companies involved for now. I’m a bit afraid it could become like wimax in the past. But ok, it was an entertaining talk, and rather good due to the lack of preparation.

I then attended a talk from Linda Wang, Red Hat on Docker usage in Enterprise. I was rather disappointed as it remained a high level presentation without too much concrete. I’d have expect more here. The only interesting aspect was the analogy of docker with appartments in a building vs houses for VMs (cgroups being control of electricity, water, …) and the mention of Kubernetes, a container orchestration & management tool from Google.

As I had appreciated Anita Kuno’s talk at LCA this year I then chose to hear her again talking this time about OpenStack Technical Governance.

And while I knew already quite a lot, I leanred some interesting details about the roles and mechanisms around +1, +2, PTL, Technical Comitee, ATC, the election procedure and its Condorcet method. In particular she explained very well the difference between an OpenStack project (git repo) and an OpenStack program (entity recognized by TC, with a PTL, a mission statement)

With some examples around the theoritical definitions, this will become a very good talk people interested in FLOSS governance should listen to. And to stay around OpenStack, after the lunch, I then passed the rest of the afternoon in the HP Helion Workshop, delivered by Mark Dunnett from HP and coordinated by Sisi Chen from HP.

While I knew already quite a lot about the topic, I learned some additional details that I wasn’t aware of, which was the goal for me to attend, as well as to network with my Helion peers !

Mark passed in my opinion a bit too much time on the reminders around OpenStack, especially for the audience around.

He then detailed precisely the differences between HP Helion OpenStack Community and HP Helion OpenStack (why are our marketing guys making it so difficult to just understand stuff by not adding Enterprise to the last one is out of my understanding, and out of the one of many customers I’m interacting with). He thus underlined in the Community edition vs the Enterprise edition the support of KVM vs KVM + ESX (vCenter needed), the 6 weeks release cycle vs Quarterly release e.g. He also talked about the VXLAN support, Icinga addition and ESX proxying in the enterprise version (again my terminology, not HP’s). And our work on the TripleO and Ironic Programs (thanks Anita !), and their usage in all HP Helion OpenStack versions.

He introduced a new component called sirius for the deployment of our storage systems, I ignored (and thus isn’t in the slideset referenced earlier yet). And explained more precisely than my slides how the HA environment is done with ha-proxy and keepalived added in overcloud controler, longside XtraDB for MySQL and RabbitMQ cluster.
And he contrates with the role of the Overcloud management controler which provides in addition some nova, ceilometer and sherpa services (in non-HA mode).

Finally he gave details on the embedded applications provided such as

• the Distributed Virtual Router (DVR) for ovs available to ease east-west traffic between VMs, solving a performance issue and dependency on the network controller, being a SPOF. The DVR will also ease north-south traffic for floating IPs.
• The L2 Gateway which adds mapping between VXLAN and VLAN (which are not able to communicate otherwise) using HP Network switch 59xx

The workshop should have contained a demo which would have made more concrete and real all the concepts seen and show the added value thatHP brings here by making the installation and preconfiguration of all these components just an easy task that every devops or sysadmin can perform to have a quick OpenStack distribution running. However, the demo had an issue and we weren’t able to go very far. Too bad as this is IMO key in such a workshop. Hopefully next version won’t have that issue.

Anyway A very good entry point for understanding our OpenStack based cloud offering, and I look forward working with them to replicate it in EMEA for our customers.

First day at LinuxCon NA 2014

Interesting to pass from vacation with family in Croatia to France after 10 hours of drive and then the day after being in a plane, flying to Chicago to attend my 3rd LinuxCon, held this time in the mythic Chicago city.

While I arrived Monday evening, I had time to catch up some mail, make some conf calls on Tuesday before attending the first part of the event, which was the VIP dinner. An opportunity to talk to HP colleagues I met for the first time physically, even if we already interacted electronically previously.

Wednesday the 20th was the first day of the event which started as usual with Jim Zemlin’s Keynote. This time he chose to talk about what the Linux Foundation rules disallow: The Linux Foundation itself ! And more largely about the roles of foundations to support open source development, their key cleaning facility role.

Jim had a quite funny slide exaplining how everybody is seeing him, while what he is really doing is cleaning stuff so Linus, Greg and thouands of others could code and manage Linux.

He also announced the new LF certification program (Certified sysadmin and Engineers). While I understand the need of having more recognized Open Source ad Linux Professionals, unlinked to a company (such as the RHCE one) I wonder whether we were needing a new certification wile we do have LPI. I hope the 2 will cooperate to avoid again proliferation. Not that proliferation is bad per se. But why dedicate multiple times efforts to create training supports, manage registrations, … when someone already works on that, maybe in a different way, but maybe patchable to be adopted by the LF. Hopefully this will be solved somehow.

After that we had the also traditional Linux Kernel panel moderated by Greg Kroah-Hartmann with Andy, S, Andrew Morton and Linus Torvalds of course. Nothing really new came out. Anyway, it’s always refreshing to see our heros on stage full of confidence and hope for what they do.

Linus insisted once more on the fact he wants Linux to be more dominant on the desktop market. As a 21 years linux desktop user myself, I can only be in agreement with that. Where is however the docker of the desktop, that will make everybody want to change and move to it ? When people see my Mageia distro they’re always surprised how many stuff you can do out of the box with a Linux Desktop. Phones have helped people go away from the monopoly interface but Macs do not help bringing back people to Linux. If at least all people attending LinuxCon and developing FLOSS would run Linux, that would be great !

Then it was time for elective sessions. I chose first to know more about devstack.
Sean Dague from HP presented OpenStack in 10 Minutes with devstack
devstack pulls everything from git. As it heavily modifies your system so do rather that in a VM/Container. devstack launches tempest (the OpenStack test suite) at the end for the install. Sean insisted on the flow of requests generated inside OpenStack and demonstrated how you can easily modify the devstack environment and re-run it to test easily your modification.

devstack provides an easy way to support modifications through a conf file. Example given if you add
API_RATE_LIMIT=False
you’ll avoid waiting for an answers from the server in case of devstack exceeding the standard rate of queries.
You can also use localrc.conf to pass specific variables up to the right component.

In order to use it, you’d need 4GB RAM (recommended). It can run in a VM (cirros will work nested). Sean warned that it does not reclone git trees by default and clean.sh should put everything back in order (but cleans stuff !)

Good presentation, easy to follow and having a quick demo part which confirms that devstack is easy to use :-)

Then I attended Joe Brockmeier’s (Red Hat) presentation around Solving the package issue

Joe explained the notion of SW collections (living under /opt). It’s Available for RHEL, CentOS and Fedora. It brings a new scl command. If you type for example
scl enable php54 “app –option”
that app uses now php 5.4 while the rest of the system ignores it.
For that you’ll need new packages: scl-utils and scl-utils-build
There is a tool spec2scl to convert spec files to generate scl compatible packages.
For more info you can look at http://softwarecollections.org

A remark I made to myself and which was later explicitely said during the presentation is that scl is useful for RHEL to provide newer versions of SW onto the enterprise distributions, while it can also help provide older versions of SW into Fedora (which is moving so fast that not all SW can adapt !).
It’s a sort of Debian backports for RHEL.
Joe also presented rpm-ostree (derived from ostree, git-like for system binaries providing an immutable tree). Under development for now, so not completely usable and probably the least interesting solution.
He moved on with docker, but was pretty generic (on purpose) and seeing it as complementary to package management, whether I think docker is another way of deploying software, which is not caring of packages by providing a layered deployment approach. While I have packaged docker for Mageia, I’m not yet familiar eough with it to be sure of that, and I’m currently working on combining it with project-builder.org. So will comment later on on that.

Then it was time to animate the FLOSS Governance roundtable for which I was attending LinuxCon. I had what I think is probably the best panel to cover the vast topic with Eileen Evans from HP, Tom Callaway from Red Hat, Gary O’Neall from Source Auditor Inc., Bradley Kuhn from Software Freedom Conservancy (and of course 45 minutes wasn’t sufficient to talk about all the subjects part of this), but I think the interactions were very interesting and lively and hope the audience enjoyed them and learned new aspects of this capital topic for our ecosystem. Of course we talked about licenses, SPDX and its future new 2.0 version, but also of foundations (echoing Jim Zemlin’s keynote), contribution agreements or tax usage (Thanks Bradley !).

And this is just the first of a series of such round tables I’ll lead in future events, but more on that later on.

After that, I discussed with Bradley Kuhn and Jilayne Lovejoy about licenses, AGPL, and various related topics, and their feedback were as usual very rich.

Was then time to go back to the latest keynote sessions. The first one I followed was from a new company (for me) CEO, Jay Rogers from Local Motors who tries to make open hardware in the automotive sector.Worth looking at and following whether they will be successful.

Then, our own Eileen Evans was on stage to explain her view on the new FLOSS Professional. And I think at her place I’d have been even more impressed as she had a full room so probably some pressure to talk to all these devs and devops. And I think her voice showed that at the begining. But when she entered in the details of the presentation, she did as usual a great job and was particularly convincing. She showed how the FLOSS professional was more than others issued from diverse backgrounds, as she illustrated with her own one. She also showed the variety of activities that each of these people have to cope with everyday, again with an illustration of one of her day of work passing from a contract management or OSRB meeting to an OpenStack foundation board conf call.

And that approach of the new FLOSS professional was a convincing echo to Jim Zemlin’s call for more professionals and the focus on people that many speakers have underlined. The FLOSS ecosystem indeed needs so many various competencies in addition to developers and FLOSS is so ubiquituous that the lack of resources is delaying some projects. And Eileen explained why this notion of FLOSS Professional is arising now. Which is in short because FLOSS usage has moved from hobbist developing for themselves to professional developing during work hours. And she also covered the impact on companies where the work in network/communities, between peers is the rule compared to the siloed classical approach. And so companies need people understanding this way of working to evolve.

It was then time to catch a bus and enjoy discussing with peers at the Museum of Science and Industry during the evening event where we could also explore the museum.

Open Source Governance Roundtable at LinuxCon North America 2014 in Chicago

I wasn’t expected to be there this year, but finally one of my proposal which was on waiting list was accepted, so I’m able to be back again this year !

I’ll animate a round table on Open Source Governance during the upcoming LinuxCon in Chicago ! I really need to thank the HP Open Source Program Office and the HP EG Presales management which are funding my travel there ! Without their support, it would not have occured.

The goal of this round table is to share the latest news in the area of Open Source Governance.
Topics covered will include:

• Status on SPDX, LSB, FHS
• licenses (e.g: analysis, new comers, usage example),
• tools (e.g: license analysis, software evaluation, reference web sites),
• best governance practices (e.g: return of experience, distribution adoption of tags, portability)

I think I’ve one of the best panel that could be gathered in the US around this topic:

• Eileen Evans, VP & Deputy General Counsel of Cloud Computing and Open Source, HP
• Bradley M. Kuhn, President & Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy
• Gary O’Neall, Responsible for product development and technology for Source Auditor Inc
• Tom Callaway, University Outreach & Fedora Special Projects, Red Hat

So don’t hesitate to come and attend this session, which will be, I’m sure, enlightening and informative on the latest hot topics in the area of Open Source compliance, governance and licenses.
And if you want to talk with me on anything MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, UEFI, HP and Linux or early music, I’ll be around during the full event. See you there.

MondoRescue 3.2.0 stabilisation

It took me time for sure. I started to work on this precise branch in October 2013. At that point, I was already happy to have a compiling version as I’ve made lots of memory management changes. But of course, it was not that simple ;-)

Then in march 2014, again, I thought I was ready to publish something ASAP. Argh !! I was wrong again.

But now is time for you to test it. I’ve fixed most of the issues I had remaining at that time (isolinux menus, NFS on Mageia 4, change of network NIC name). But the main one which took me hours to fix is linked to systemd. I’ve concentrated all my tests on Fedora 20 (which is very near from RHEL 7 that is an important target of course). But it’s not before a discussion with a systemd developer during LinuxCon Japan that I understood where the problem was.

At restore time, mindi init script was mounting the /dev filesystem as tmpfs instead of devtmpfs. Once I made the change, systemd-udev was able to be launched and work correctly for me at restore time, so the restore of fedora 20 was starting to work.

Of course, after that, I had other points to fix to name a few:

• fully support systemd and its multiple compagnon binaries
• fully support grub2 and its installer
• avoid some memory management issues in corner cases using a lot valgrind
• Remove from mindi 2 functions replaced by perl code (ReadAllLink by mr-read-all-link and ProcessLDD by mr-process-ldd)
• cleanup of old useless file in /tmp suposedly used for mondo/mindi commnuication
• Adds lvmetad daemon to list and launch it at restore time as new LVM version seems to need it
• Rename the conf file mondo-restore.cfg into mondorestore.cfg for homogeneity
• NETFS-SERVER-MOUNT remains the only built file by mondo for net configuration, lots of code cleanup and mindi now uses mr-net-get-config to build the network conf
• Add support for latest Fedora keymap file (/etc/vconsole.conf) and non us keyboard detection

So that explains the delay you’ve seen in the publication of test versions.
But now, It’s time !!!

I’ve been able to make a full backup / restore / restart of the restored fedora 20 distribution in a full automatic mode without issue anymore ! Yep, I deserve some vacation !!!

So it’s your turn now to test this version and tell me what I’ve missed, and if that doesn’t create regressions for your prefered distro.
Available as usual at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/test

Now this version requires in addition to the afio or buffer packages also the perl modules developed for MondoRescue (at the same place) and for project-builder.org located at ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/

Not all distros have been built correctly yet. Let me know what is missing, I’ll try to update during my week in Barcelona. I’m particularly interested by Fedora users for now, and more generaly other systemd users.

If tests are globally positive, I’ll publish it early July. And I’ll look at porting some of these changes back into 3.0.5 and add one or two features that have been asked for some time by some customers, but we’ll have to prioritize stuff. Again give feedback here.