How can Govs help FOSS businesses

Dear Lazyweb,

A group of FOSS ambassadors (of which I am one) have been invited to visit government officials who are "interested" in open-source. The goal will be to pitch open-source and why adopting it would have various benefits on a national level.

A more specific point that should be discussed is How can the government help local FOSS businesses grow in order to help, support and grow a FOSS-oriented eco-system (Developers, Support professionals, VARs...)

If you were in that meeting, what points would you make ?

Thanks!

Ensemble IRC meeting today

When? Today 6pm-UTC
What? Ensemble cloud community meeting
For? Ensemble simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of services in the cloud. We've answered the what is Ensemble question previously, but there's nothing like one to one discussions! Interested to learn more? ask your questions ? connect to the development team ? Start writing formulas to deploy your software or even start hacking on Ensemble core? Then this meeting is perfect for you. Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-cloud today 6pm-UTC

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 

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

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

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. 

Read More at: http://cloud.ubuntu.com/2011/04/ensemble-cloud-community-meeting/

Feel free to tweet/dent and spread this around the globe. Got feedback? Leave me comments on cloud.ubuntu.com or on my blog

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).

Ubuntu Cloud Days, Day-2 Summary

Yesterday was the second and final day of cloud days. It was such a blast! Very interesting stuff, and very cool community to be part of! In case you missed it, you can still read up the logs, and you can reach me and others for questions and comments on #ubuntu-cloud .. Let's quickly zip through yesterday's sessions

16.00 UTC smoser gave a very good introduction to the different ways with which you can rebundle UEC or EC2 images for Ubuntu, how you can customize them and the different pros and cons. Scott also answered lots of questions
17.00 UTC tetet started by presenting some interesting new features and tricks that can be used with UEC namely persistency, which means kexec'ing the kernel to load from an EBS volume resulting in persistent UEC instances. Thorsten zipped through the session quickly, but as a pro instructor, he was very well prepared with links to graphics, links and documentation
18.00 UTC Daviey wowed the crowd with a puppet introductory session, he showed how to configure apache with puppet and what it takes and deploy a basic system to get running fast. It was a great session
19.00 UTC edulix took over to present an awesome session about using hadoop and its map/reduce programming model to crunch on large (we're talking terabytes) of data on lots of machines. Very interesting and useful session
20.00 UTC obino had the final say on cloud days. The session was about UEC/Eucalyptus. He presented a detailed architecture of the system, what each node does, how things work. He also explained how to get started contributing to the eucalyptus community. 

It was a great event. Big Thank-Yous to everyone who presented in UCD. Till next time o/

Day-2 Ubuntu Cloud Days

Yesterday was great! It was Ubuntu Cloud Days, the event was packed with very interesting sessions, hundreds of attendees, lots of questions got answered, tons of ideas and comments were made. I personally had lots of fun, and was literally stuck to my keyboard the full time of the event


Let's zip through what happened yesterday (If you missed it, Click the time to read the logs!)
16.00 UTC kim0 (me) took-over, gave a quick introduction about cloud computing, differences between public and private clouds and what the cloud fuss is all about
17.00 UTC semiosis started a great session about building scalable distributed storage on the EC2 Cloud using Glusterfs for improving redundancy, and performance
18.00 UTC SpamapS gave a cool presentation and hands-on demo of a new Ubuntu ground breaking "service" management framework called Ensemble. While in early development phase, it's already working well and is changing how we look at server management
19.00 UTC hallyn took over presenting a technically deep discussion and hands-on demo about LXC Linux containers technology. This is a light weight Linux virtualization (or container) technology
20.00 UTC soren took over to talk about OpenStack, one of the cloud stacks that Ubuntu ships with 11.04 that's been getting lots of cloud people excited lately. Soren explained how the whole thing got started, explained the architecture, answered lots of questions and discussed what we should be seeing in the future

Here's a sneak peak of today's sessions

Thu 24th Mar
16.00 UTC rebundling/re-using Ubuntu’s UEC images — smoser
17.00 UTC UEC persistency — tetet
18.00 UTC Puppet Configuration Management — Daviey
19.00 UTC Using hadoop, divide and conquer — edulix
20.00 UTC UEC/Eucalyptus Private Cloud — obino

Let's get crunching on even more cool sessions today! If you’re new to IRC, you can simply use this web page to join. For more information, check out the wiki page, also feel free to ping “kim0″ on IRC!

Today is Ubuntu Cloud Days

Today is .. dum roll ... Ubuntu Cloud Days! The event starts at 4pm UTC on irc #ubuntu-classroom. Updates to the schedule include an OpenStack session, a Eucalyptus session and a puppet session! Those attending the Ensemble session are in for a treat :) During Cloud Days, you’ll learn lots of exciting stuff, you’ll interact with tons of smart people, and you’ll just have fun! Spread the word, join in and bring your friends!

Here’s the sessions schedule

Wed 23rd Mar
16.00 UTC Cloud Computing 101, Ask your questions — kim0
17.00 UTC Scaling shared-storage web apps in the cloud with Ubuntu & GlusterFS — semiosis
18.00 UTC What is Ensemble? – Presentation and Demo — SpamapS
19.00 UTC Using Linux Containers in Natty — hallyn
20.00 UTC Open-Stack Introduction — soren

Thu 24th Mar
16.00 UTC rebundling/re-using Ubuntu’s UEC images — smoser
17.00 UTC UEC persistency — tetet
18.00 UTC Puppet Configuration Management — Daviey
19.00 UTC Using hadoop, divide and conquer — edulix
20.00 UTC UEC/Eucalyptus Private Cloud — obino

All session happen in IRC (Freenode) in #ubuntu-classroom. If you’re new to IRC, you can simply use this web page to join. For more information, check out the wiki page, also feel free to ping “kim0″ on IRC

Additional links:

• Ubuntu Cloud Facebook page
• Ubuntu Cloud Twitter page
• Ubuntu Cloud Identi.ca page

Ubuntu Cloud Days approaching

Just a reminder, Ubuntu Cloud Days is approaching, it's only two days away! Yes it's this Wed/Thu. I just posted the full details on the Ubuntu Cloud Portal. Check it out, and leave me a comment if you have any questions

Cloud Python hackers wanted

A while back I had blogged (yes the one with the big uncle Sam pic) asking for people interested in working on a python tool to help migrate ebs AMIs across ec2 regions. Since then the project has progressed a bit:

- Project page is now: https://launchpad.net/ec2-migrate-ebs-ami
- Project is now able to launch two utility instances in the two specified regions, and mount the source volume in the source instance
- What remains is attaching a destination volume, and sync'ing over contents. More details can be found on the blueprint: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-server-n-ec2-migrate-region

Development pace has now slowed down significantly, as such I am renewing the call. This is a great way to start getting involved with cloud development, and to join the Ubuntu Cloud and server communities! joining in is "easy", you don't even have to know lots of python to start hacking! The steps are very well defined, and I am happy to help with all steps along the way. If you are thinking about it, go ahead and get in touch with me right now (kim0 on irc, kim0 AT ubuntu.com) or join today's irc meeting (6pm-UTC #ubuntu-cloud https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudMeeting) and start discussing how you can get involved

Two weeks to Ubuntu Cloud Days

Two weeks from now, Ubuntu Cloud Days begin! The very first dedicated Ubuntu Cloud Days event from March 23^rd to March 24^th 2011!

Cloud computing is changing the face of IT and Ubuntu Server is arguably the most popular Cloud based Operating System with millions of instances launched a year! Are you interested to know more about using Ubuntu Server on the Cloud ? Find out from March 23^rd to March 24^th 2011

Ubuntu Cloud Days is a series of online sessions where you can learn more about:

• Answering your questions about Ubuntu and the Cloud
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Images, using Ubuntu with Amazon EC2 cloud
• Building your private cloud over Ubuntu Server platform
• New virtualization and container technologies in Ubuntu Server
• Crunching Big-Data on the cloud with hadoop
• Scaling your web-apps on the cloud with Ubuntu
• much more...

Read more about UCD at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays

If you are interested to deliver a session, please get in contact with me! While the timetable is now "full", there's no reason why we can't extend an extra session (or day!). Ping me (kim0 AT ubuntu.com) or (kim0 on IRC)

Mark your calendar, Join in and Bring your friends ;)

Additional links:

• Ubuntu Cloud Facebook page
• Ubuntu Cloud Twitter page
• Ubuntu Cloud Identi.ca page

Volunteer QA to Ubuntu Server

A great way to help contribute to Ubuntu and ensure Ubuntu Server remains the rock solid platform that it is, is by committing to helping perform specific QA tests in predefined scenarios. If you're interested, the following test cases specifically need someone to step up and commit to them

• Install (JeOS on ESX) QA Testcase
• Install (JeOS on KVM) QA Testcase
• iSCSI Authenticated Root Installation QA Testcase
• iSCSI Unauthenticated Root Installation QA Testcase

These tests are being marked as NOT required for ISO release exit criteria for Ubuntu Server. Quoting Robbie Williamson "Our decision was based on the lack of consistently available resources to verify these configurations. With that said, we are keeping them optional"

Robbie adds "Anyone wishing to reverse this decision, please contact me directly.  I have no problem adding them back along with your agreement to run them for each ISO release"

Again that's a great way to contribute to Ubuntu. If interested please contact Robbie directly, or contact me (leave a comment right here) and I will help get you on track

Help Ubuntu Server, Voice your Opinion

Hello Ubuntu Cloud and Server communities. Now is your chance to voice your opinion about Ubuntu server, as well as help make it better! The Ubuntu marketing team would like more insight into why your organization has chosen to deploy Ubuntu on the server/cloud sides (or why they did not) as well as your opinion as to how Ubuntu server can improve. If you're a pro-IT person deploying or supporting Ubuntu server or cloud in any capacity, please help make Ubuntu better by helping us better understand your needs. Here's a survey designed for just that

http://survey.ubuntu.com/

Thanks!

Jono'ed at Dallas sprint

I'm attending Ubuntu's sprint at Dallas, and I've just been Jono'ed. Check out this video where Jono asks me about everything cloud communitish. If you wanna know how to get involved with the ubuntu cloud community, there are some good pointers in there

Cloud Community Flash, Adnane

Being my last post of 2010 (Hello 2011!) I wanted it to be special, thus I would like to thank every member and contributor to the Ubuntu cloud community, the whole Ubuntu community, and more generally Linux and the rest of the Open-Source world!

Let's meet Adnane Belmadiaf. Adnane is a committed Ubuntu community member, who has been rocking for the past few months. He's done some great work on the Ubuntu cloud portal. I asked him for a few words about himself, and here's what he has to say

AB: Hi, I'm Adnane, a 22 years old Ubuntu user based in Morocco. I was born to be a Web developer (Yes i am a CSS ninja XD) and I am a happy Linux user since 2008. I started actively contributing in 2009. I participated in many projects for Ubuntu such as (The Ubuntu Manual Project, LoCo Directory, and the Ubuntu Cloud Portal). It is a very good experience for me because I learnt and still learn a lot of things from others! The Ubuntu community is something that I’m very passionate about. It’s just awesome to see how it grows and evolves.it’s an inspiring environment to be part of!

AK: What keeps you motivated contributing to Ubuntu?

There are a lot of things that help me to stay motivated, but first and foremost - it's the great people i am working with, the atmosphere is always fun and everybody around you is there for support. You know that you're not alone. The appreciation for the work i have done - When a project/work is done there is that quite nice "Thank You" that keeps me motivated all the time. I'm constantly challenged to learn new things and I simply enjoy coding and solving problems. I would tell to everyone who want to be involved on the community, that patience and good work are the keys to success. it’s almost one year since i joined the community and the results are quite surprising. I now think I am ready to apply for an Ubuntu membership, which I am currently pursuing. Wish me luck :)

Ubuntu Cloud Tech Content

I had sent out calls to the Ubuntu cloud community asking what kind of technical content or training materials (tutorials, screencasts ..etc) they were interested in seeing. I got quite some feedback that boils down to the following being the top 10 topics

• Modifying Ubuntu images and rebundling to EC2
• Creating images from scratch with vmbuilder
• P2V and V2V conversions (Physical, VirtualBox, VMware...)
• Advanced cloud-init (custom handlers, multi-server, includes)
• Provisioning and deploying Web applications (e.g. rails, django) to the cloud
• Best practices for upgrading a server install cross-release
• Load balanced LAMP multi-tier installation
• Best practices around creating cloud instance snapshots
• Backing up live cloud instances
• Restoring cloud servers from backup/snapshots

Now, what's a better way to spend your holidays than hacking together content addressing those needs! Yup, nothing beats helping your fellow Ubuntuians :) So if you're feeling like contributing content to any of the above, drop me a comment or shoot me an email (kim0 AT ubuntu.com). If you'd like to contribute to some other content, do grab me as well! If you're unsure, or want to talk about how you can get involved (there's always a way) tune in to the weekly cloud community hour

Ubuntu Cloud Community Meeting

Just a quick update, the weekly cloud community meeting time has been changed to 6pm-UTC, so that the US is awake. Everyone is invited, it's a free party! Once in the meeting, we'll all be helping each other out, trying to answer questions, having discussions, agreeing, disagreeing but most certainly having fun :) If you're not sure whether or not you should attend, trust me you should. It's a free form meeting where everything goes! So come along and bring your friends.

More details on how to join are at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudMeeting

Announcing Ubuntu Cloud Portal

Another rocking day for the Ubuntu Cloud community! The Ubuntu Cloud Portal has just been launched hurray. The portal helps new-comers to the Ubuntu cloud community quickly find interesting information they may care about such as documentation to read/edit, projects that may interest them and so on. In this first release the following is available

Front page: Lists important news to the Ubuntu Cloud community, latest tweets and happenings (RSS). The front page also features the widely anticipated (drum roll please ... ) AMI Locator application which helps anyone using Ubuntu on the EC2 cloud quickly locate the AMI needed. Go ahead and bookmark this right now
Documentation: Quick links to useful documentation pages on the wiki. If you'd like to start contributing, let me know
Community: Pointers to where you should be, mailing lists you should subscribe to, forums and IRC rooms that should interest you
Developer: Once you're ready to start contributing, this page should list all open-source projects that relate to Ubuntu and the cloud. I have added quick links to locate code/bugs/community/features for every project
Planet: Collecting Every word written about Ubuntu Cloud on the world wide web (RSS). If you think your blog should be aggregated here, let me know!

This is only the first release, so I'm sure lots could be added. Please do ping me if you would like to help improve the portal in anyway, or generally if you'd like to contribute to Ubuntu Cloud efforts. I've put together a quick video demo'ing the portal



I would like to thank the Ubuntu server and cloud teams for their help and guidance. I would also like to thank Adnan Belmadiaf (daker on IRC) for his continued contributions to this portal. Adnan is a 22 years old Ubuntu user living in Salé, Morocco, he works as a Web Developer. He's a member of the Ubuntu Morrocan Team, and involved in different projects such as (The Ubuntu Manual Project, The Loco Directory, The elementary project). It's that fuzzy warm feeling of contributing to Ubuntu that keeps its community rocking. Let me know what you guys think in comments.