August 15th, 2010
OpenSolaris was dropped by Oracle
As many people already suspected, Oracle will ditch OpenSolaris as announced here: OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express. The first Solaris 11 Express release is expected end of this year. If is has similar usage restrictions like the Oracle 10 Express database then it will be quite useless.
OpenSolaris was a good thing for both, Sun and its customers. Customers had a continuous preview of upcoming features in new Solaris versions. Sun was getting feedback from customers. The community was able to contribute to the product. It had a similar role for Sun as Fedora has it for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenSUSE for Novell.
Still open source, but closed development model
While most parts of Solaris are staying open source, Oracle switched the open source development model into a closed source model. Quoting the announcement: We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.
This will also affect other projects and products such as FreeBSD’s ZFS support and Nexanta.
Light at the end of the tunnel
The light at the end of the tunnel is the newly founded project Illumos. A main sponsor of the project is Nextanta, as its main building block of the product is OpenSolaris.
What is the OpenSource strategy of Oracle?
It is unclear what Oracle is planning for its other open source products such as OpenOffice, MySQL and Java. In the past, all of those products have been open source enablers for companies. The is little to no information about those products.
Not really fun….
Tags: Opensource, Solaris, Unix
Posted in Unix | No Comments »
July 23rd, 2010
Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers.
So, what are the news?
1. The bugs in the virtio drivers have been fixed, you can deploy RHEL6 in KVM environments again.
2. The vmware_ballooning driver has been backported.
3. A lot of minor bugs have been fixed, see the announcement.
Especially point two is cool, running RHEL6 in a VMware ESX environment does not necessarily need the vmware-tools installed anymore. RHEL6 now provides all three important vm-ware related drivers: The vmxnet3, vmware_ballooning and pvscsi. At the end of the day, this means one can dismiss the always-hated vmware-tools. A test of the behavior w/o vmware-tools by a ESX specialist is pending.
The alternative of vmware-tools are the open-vm-tools. This would add the benefit of controlled shutdown of the ESX guest with the vCenter tools. Since VMware does not provide (yet) RHEL 6 packages of the open-vm-tools I was unable to test it.
I made the same brief tests as I reported here. It seems that Red Hat is back on track, RHEL6b2.1 is reliable and not far away from being ready for production.
When can we expect a Beta3? Will there even be a next beta, or is Red Hat release a RC1 soon? There is still no published release schedule, all we know is “later this year”.
Anyway: Download Beta2.1 and test it, its a pretty cool release. If you find bugs, report them.
Have fun!
Tags: KVM, Red Hat, RHEL, RHEL6, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized, Virtualization | 2 Comments »
July 21st, 2010
Red Hat today announced the availability of a “refreshed” RHEL6 beta2. Is seems that the problems that I have reported before was hitting not only me, but a lot of users too.
You can download the beta, lets call it 2.1 at ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/5.90Server/x86_64/iso/RHEL6.0-20100715.2-Server-x86_64-DVD1.iso
I’ll keep you posted about the news….
Have fun!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2010
In short: It was a non-experience because the RHEL 6 Beta 2 distribution is not installable…
[Update]It is not a anaconda bug, but a bug in a paravirt driver. On ESX installation runs smooth, expect a more detailed report in the next few days[/update]
While downloading the ISO, I was very curious about it and my nerves were all on edge, like a little boy waiting for Christmas.
Afterwards I tried to install it as a KVM guest on my Systems, on OpenSUSE 11.2 and Fedora 13. On both the installation failed. Depending on the size of the RAM is was failing before the actual installation begun (1GB), or it was hanging while the packages are being installed (2GB RAM).
Connected bugs: #610510, #610261, #610255
Because of the non-installation, I only have seen one progress since beta 1: The critical security hole in anaconda have been closed. In beta 1, during the installation there was a sshd running and everyone was able to login as root without authentication.
I hope Red Hat will release a corrected ISO in the next few days to allow us testing the beta2.
Tags: Red Hat, RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
June 30th, 2010
As announced on the mailing list rhelv5-announce@redhat.com, Red Hat released beta2 of it upcoming RHEL6 enterprise product.
I’m actually disappointed by Red Hat, I was thinking that RHEL6 will be released GA on the summit a few days ago. It was not released. And instead of communicating a date, even a approximate date, the only message was “later this year”.
I do not understand Red Hat. Beta 1 is a rock solid Linux Distribution, with very few grave bugs detected. Of course, I do not like “banana products” where customers are the beta testers, but on this case, Red Hat behaves the other extreme way: GA of RHEL6 needs to be perfect.
I’m currently downloading RHEL6b2, and I’ll test it. Please wait a few hours for my test and its report.
Have fun!
Cheers,
Luc
Tags: RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 1st, 2010
As I wrote different times before, RHEL6 is going to have a Kernel based on upstreams 2.6.32 Kernel. Meanwhile Linus Torvalds and his fellows released 2.6.34. Since then – from a System Engineers Point of view – there have some “minor” changes which are affecting the daily work in enterprise environments.
I think that Red Hat is aware that RHEL6 is one of its most important releases made so far. RHEL6 Beta-Testers have acknowledged that this is one of the best Linux distributions made so far.
So lets have a look to http://bit.ly/98yNsk (https://bugzilla.redhat.com search for RHEL6 select all states, sort by Bug-ID and having RFE (Request For Enhancement) in Summary).
Unrar
I requested to add “unrar” to RHEL, unfortunatly they refused because of the strange license of unrar. This is really not understandable, because *ALL* major Linux distros such as SLES, Debian, Ubuntu are providing a package for it. Red Hat think (and they are right) it is a “unfree” license. From my point of view it does not hurt because nobody is forced to use its libs in own software. Unfortunately SAP distributes a lot of software components in RAR-compressed files, this is a problem.
virtio net/vhost net speed enhancements from upstream kernel
This was reported as bug #593158 and later appeared as #595287. Since Red Hat is keen to improve virtualization things, I think this is going to GA.
DRBD
DRBD was getting into upstream Kernel 2.6.33. DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is some kind of RAID-1 over TCP/IP and is rock solid since years. From my point of view it is the best invention since sliced bread when it comes to cluster technologies. It is widely used, also on RHEL. Have a look to Florians Haas’ comment about support, and further to Alan Robertson’s comment. While Florian is working at Linbit (the developer company of DRBD) points to support problems existing on current releases on RHEL, Alan is a “Urgestein” (sorry, cant find a English word for it, it is meant in a very positive manner) of Linux clustering likes too to have DRBD in RHEL6. Quite a lot of people are included in the bugs CC list (as I’m writing 37 people). This brings quite some preasure on Red Hat to include DRBD in RHEL6. @Red Hat: Do it! include DRBD! If not as a “supported” product, deliver it and find a way with Linbit for the support.
Getting rid of the crappy VMware-tools
For people urged to use VMWares ESX stuff as virtalization technology, there is another important thing that changed: In 2.6.34 upstream Kernel, Linus Torvalds accepted VMWares ballooning driver (vmmemctl). In 2.6.33 Linus accepted VMWares vmxnet3 and pvscsci drivers which have been already backported to RH’s Kernel 2.6.32-EL. So, also backporting vmmemctl is *THE* chance to get rid of those crappy VMWare Tools. For companies relying on ESX this would be a *VERY* important feature. I’ll made a service request (SR 2021028) @Red Hat and will file a RFE-Bug at bugzilla ASAP. Please vote for it!
Other stuff
There are other RFE’s pending. Most of them are not really important for enterprise computing (my point of view). Mostly this RFE’s are about virtualization and bound to libvirt. Most of these RFE’s seems to be trivial and are on status “ON_QA” which means they are most probably included in RHEL6.
What is your favorit RFE-Bug? Please let me know…
Have fun!
Luc
Tags: RHEL, RHEL6, Virtualization
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization | 4 Comments »
May 27th, 2010
A couple of days there have been some reports that Red Hat will release a commercialized version of deltacloud, an abstraction layer for different kinds of virtualization technologies and clouds such as VMware, RHEV, Amazon EC2 etc.
Red Hat puts a lot of resources on virtualization, they maintain and/or sponsor multiple projects in parallel. The most important from my point of view is libvirt which is as well an abstraction layer for different virtulization technologies such as VMware, KVM, Xen and others. Libvirt and deltacloud are partially redundant.
It is not the only redundancy created by Red Hat. There is also O-virt “competing” with RHEV. Both are not tightly bound to RHN satellite or Spacewalk.
RHEV works with system templates similar to those at VMware. On the other hand: Koan, together with cobbler is a deployment software for virtual hosts and was recently bundled with RHN satellite.
Not all of those Red Hat virtualization projects are working well together. So the question arises: What is the strategy of having such redundancies of projects? Why not integrating all of this projects and glue them together?
Lots of questions…
Have fun!
Tags: Cloud, ESX, KVM, Red Hat, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization | 2 Comments »
May 26th, 2010
I had my doubts that Fedora 13 get released. I was wrong, and that good!
I did not had the time yet to upgrade my F12 systems, according to a lot twitter users it is a smooth process.
Read the Release Notes. I’ll be happy to hear your feedback 
Have fun!
Luc
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 24th, 2010
After being postponed twice, it seems that this time it can be postponed again due to some show stoppers.
As of today, three bugs are of status new. From my point of, none of them is a real show stopper. The gravest one is possibly #587627 which is of status ON_QA.
So there is still a chance to get F13 released tomorrow.
Have fun!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 23rd, 2010
OTRS is known as best-of-breed in open source incident management systems. Since quite some time, OTRS made its product ITIL V3 compliant. Means: It also comes with a change management module.
At work we use a complex and extremely user-unfriedly software. This brought me to the idea to test the OTRS change management module in order to propose OTRS as a replacement for the currently used software for the Change- Incident- and Problem Management.
Incident- and Change Management integration
I was surprised how easy it is to change the ITIL type of a ticket from “Incident” to “RfC”. As soon as the ticket is of type RfC a new button appears: Create Change. The ticket gets automatically linked to the new change. Creating the change looks strait forward. Assigning people to the CAB was also quite easy. You also can generate a CAB-template with a few clicks. So far so good…
Where the trouble begins
The newly created change is now of status “Requested”. Whats next? Right! to approve it! But how? OTRS is using something they call “state engine”. You need to add “Workorders” and “Conditions” to your change. For a standard-change I made a template with a condition “If workorder-title=Standard-Change, set change to status approved“. In this case you just link a “workorder” to the change, call it “Standard-Change” and your change will be approved. Next Condition is to set the state of the change to “successful” when the “Workorder” is of state closed. At the end of the day three tasks and approx. 20 clicks for a simple standard-change. Not too bad.
Where it goes to insanity
Non-Standard-Changes usually have a CAB (Change Advisory Board). This makes sense because the change-requester usually does mot have the full overview about complex systems and services. Now, as I wrote further up, it is quite easy to create and assign a CAB to a change. So how works the process? Usually every single member of the CAB must approve a particular change. It should be easy to send all the CAB-Members a Email with a link where they can approve or reject the change. In OTRS this is a huge and very complex task.
The change manager or change creator has to create a “workworder” of type “Approval” for every single CAB-Member AND create a condition to it. If you plan a huge change such as upgrading Powerlines in a Datacenter, the CAB can grow to dozens of people. I tried with two CAB members and it was costing me about 20 minutes to create it (Without proper texts in the change and workorders). Think about a 20-people CAB. It will take hours just to create a proper change! This is so nuts!
Why are all ITIL compliant change mangement tools just crap?
ITIL processes are quite simple. One should think it is also easy to implement them in software and in companies. Wrong! The mind of People with ITIL-Roles such as “Change Manager”, “Problem Manager”, “Availability Manager” and “you-name-it-manager” works obviously different. It looks like they add as much complexity as possible even to every simple task. Obviously the ITIL-compliant software developers think the same way or got the orders to do so. I think this is the root cause of the completely unusable software OTRS::ITSM Changemanagement and others such as Remedy and Peregrine.
Conclusion
As there is no easy usable software on the market, companies should either write its own software or getting the less-crappiest software around. At the end of the day I’m tired of this and I’m not going to test similar software again.
Tags: ITIL
Posted in Infrastructure, Uncategorized, Web Servers and Applications | 3 Comments »
