Monday, April 18, 2011

Help Squash Natty Server Bugs

Mirroring a post from Ubuntu Server developer Dave Walker, If you're capable and willing to help squash some server bugs, your effort and contribution is really needed now! Join us on irc #ubuntu-server, ask around if you need help. Thanks in advance

Here is a list of current bugs that should hopefully be fixed for Natty release.  The bugs with "Not assigned to anyone :(", could really do  with someone volunteering to take.  Please feel free to assign yourself, if you are willing to take on working towards a fix. 

If you are an assignee, please make sure that the current status (and comments) accurately represent the status before tomorrows server team meeting. 

== Bugs for the server team == 
[655533] [likewise-open] [master] package likewise-open 5.4.0.42111-2ubuntu2 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 (http://pad.lv/655533
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Not assigned to anyone :( 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[726769] [eucalyptus] package eucalyptus-common 2.0.1 bzr1255-0ubuntu1 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 (http://pad.lv/726769
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Assigned to: Dave Walker 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[661453] [dovecot] dovecot.conf always shows as having been locally modified on update (http://pad.lv/661453
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Assigned to: Clint Byrum 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[745946] [cloud-init] cloud-final job did not run in ec2-automated-tests (http://pad.lv/745946
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Not assigned to anyone :( 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[759943] [mod-wsgi] mod_wsgi.so-3.2 gives errors (http://pad.lv/759943
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Not assigned to anyone :( 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-15 
[764391] [cobbler] cobbler fails to manage bind9  (http://pad.lv/764391
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Assigned to: James Page 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[745930] [cloud-init] cloud-init timeout waiting for metadata service on EC2 (http://pad.lv/745930
 * Bug Status: New 
 * Not assigned to anyone :( 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-15 
[760288] [Ubuntu] JeOS is oversized (http://pad.lv/760288
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Not assigned to anyone :( 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-15 

 == Bugs being worked on in other areas, more for information == 
[728088] [debian-installer] iscsi root with or without auth fails to boot (http://pad.lv/728088
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Assigned to: Colin Watson 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-14 
[747090] [linux] wrong return address sometimes pushed for INT in kvm (not qemu) (http://pad.lv/747090
 * Bug Status: Fix Committed 
 * Assigned to: Andy Whitcroft 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[566818] [plymouth] Cryptsetup passphrase prompt during boot: every character typed repeats the prompt (http://pad.lv/566818
 * Bug Status: Confirmed 
 * Assigned to: Surbhi Palande 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-16 
[580319] [upstart] dhcp3-server launches before upstart brings all interface, thus failing to start (http://pad.lv/580319
 * Bug Status: Triaged 
 * Assigned to: James Hunt 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 
[759545] [grub2] user prompted to update unmodified grub configuration during Ubuntu server upgrade (http://pad.lv/759545
 * Bug Status: New 
 * Last updated: 2011-04-18 

Friday, April 15, 2011

Cloud Portal Intro

Just written a nice introduction to Ubuntu cloud portal on Ubuntu News. If you don't know about that, or are new to the Ubuntu cloud scene, check it out and ping me back for any questions or comments

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Ensemble Cloud Community Meeting Summary

Yesterday was the first Ubuntu Cloud community meeting to include Ensemble. It was such a blast. Personally I find the ensemble project to be incredibly cool, it's such a paradigm shift into how services (rather than servers) should be managed especially in this cloud age. Here's a quick summary of the main points mentioned during yesterday's meeting


  • The ensemble-team just landed some changes to formula authorship, specifically the relation-changed-hook was broken out into three separate hooks the relation-joined, relation-changed, relation-departed
    • joined denotes that a unit of the related service came online
    • changed denotes the unit of a related service changed its settings
    • departed denotes the unit of a related service went offline
  • This hook split is helpful to avoid subtle race conditions, and make formula authorship easier
  • Ensemble team is now working on formula upgrades
    • For now the team is only tackling an initial step of upgrading just the formula itself and only if it's already running
    • Example command would be: ensemble upgrade-formula --repository=examples mydbservice
    • That will look into the repo directory for a formula matching the formula of myblog, verify its a newer revision, upload and it mark the units for upgrade
    • On the unit side, they'll detect they need upgrades, download the formula, and most importantly, execute the upgrade-hook from the new formula
    • A suggestion came up, that the upgrade hook would be informed which version the upgrade process is starting from
  • A Question comes up, whether hooks should be implemented in a specific language. The answer is that all hooks are effectively just executables, those executables can be in any language and use any tools they'd like
  • Ensemble team is also working on orchestrating around firewall addressing such that the firewall is configurable by the ensemble user (ensemble expose, ensemble unexpose), with corresponding hooks (exposed, unexposed), and hook commands  (open-port, close-port)
    • The draft for that is on http://people.canonical.com/~niemeyer/ensemble/drafts/expose-services.html
    • expose and unexpose are for now operating on top of ec2 security-groups, in the future however multiple backends can be implemented (cisco firewalls..etc)! Without even needing to change the formula, quite impressive!
  • A question was asked whether ensemble is ready for public collaboration, the answer to which is a definite yes!
    • Grab the code today: bzr branch lp:ensemble
    • Join the mailing list: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ensemble
    • Join IRC channels #ubuntu-cloud, #ubuntu-ensemble
If you liked this, be sure to join the next meeting (Every Wed, 18:00-UTC in #ubuntu-cloud). Have questions or comment? Leave me a comment right here, or ping me (kim0) on IRC

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Ensemble Cloud Community Meeting

Ensemble is an exciting new cloud technology innovated by Ubuntu. If you’re curious what it does (I bet you are) it is a service orchestration framework with focus on rapid cloud deployment. That is to say, it allows one to rapidly deploy cloud instances, bootstrap them, install software on them, configure them as well as link them all together to provide you (as a sys-admin or DevOp) with an end-user facing high-level “service” (Load Balanced CMS with sharded Database, Multinode email service installation…etc). Ensemble has been compared to being APT for the cloud! Now does that sound interesting, it sure is if you ask me! Welcome to next generation Linux infrastructure automation.

If that got you interested, be sure to attend the weekly IRC meeting on Wed 18:00-UTC on #ubuntu-cloud
Feel free to tweet/dent and spread this around the globe. Got feedback? Leave me comments on cloud.ubuntu.com or on my blog

Monday, April 11, 2011

Help Shape Maps.Ubuntu.com

About either months ago, I had started on a fun little project to raise awareness of how widely used Ubuntu Server is around the world. The result was http://maps.ubuntu.com/ a web tool allowing anyone using Ubuntu Server to "mark" his location on a global map. This was launched with celebrations for 10.04.1, and thousands of cities were marked (woohoo). The project code was open-sourced and lives at https://launchpad.net/mapuntu/trunk

It's been a while since the project was last updated, a few days ago, an Ubuntu community member ( hey Ronnie ) stepped up to re-shape the mapuntu project and relaunch it into an inspiring map that helps anyone record and locate Ubuntu events around the globe! The first part of that effort is creating a proper back-end API, everyone is encouraged to click that link and leave comments. If you are inspired by that project, and would like to help, please get involved! Things you can do to help include

  • Review and enhance the proposed API
  • Help write python code to implement the backend api
  • Write html/css/js for the front-end
  • Play with the code, test it, report bugs, adapt to your own website!


If you want to talk more about this, Please join #ubuntu-locoteams on IRC and ping Ronnie or myself (kim0, also on #ubuntu-cloud).

Friday, April 1, 2011

Creating Customized UEC and EC2 Images

Want to create a customized Ubuntu cloud image that you can deploy to EC2 or UEC ? No problem! Check out this 5 min video where I demo everything needed to download, customize, rebundle and publish the new image to EC2! Isn't this just great :)



If you can't see the embedded player, here's a direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1IwTGLWbu0