RHEL6 « Luc de Louw's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘RHEL6’

rhn satellite 5.4 release in sight

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

When analyzing recent Bugzilla-reports and mailing list posts, we can expect a RHN Satellite release quite soon. Why? The main reason for this is the lack of SHA256 support in sat530. Since RHEL6 packages having SHA256 checksums, the release of Satellite 5.4 is a prerequisite for releasing RHEL6. As always there will also be a large load of bugfixes included.

Expected new features

yum repository syncronising
Support for SHA256 checksums
Maybe support for SHA384 checksums
Support for Oracle 11g databases (on external servers)
Improved preformance
Orphaned profile elimination to prevent wasting entitlement
Runs on RHEL6 (and thus Tomcat6?)
Recording of the install-date of packages

Of course, this list can be wrong. Because lots of bugzilla entries are not open to the public this list also tends to be incomplete. Lets have a closer look to the new features that most probably will hit rhn satellite 5.4

yum repository syncronising
This feature allows to sync custom channels with an external yum repository. Lot of people are mirroring EPEL and IUS repositories with the help of wget and push the packages into the satellite with the help of rhnpush. In future there will be a command like spacewalk-repo-sync –channel you-name-it-custom-channel (maybe the command will be renamed to rhn-repo-sync). This new feature will not only safe some GB of disk space, it will also speedups the process of getting new packages from external repos.

In Spacewalk 1.1 there were a lot of improvements made on repo handling. Hopefully sat540 will have them too. Since I was not able to figure out which Spacewalk version is the upstream for sat540, I can only hope that it will be version 1.1.

Support for SHA256 checksums
RHEL6 packages are all coming with SHA256 checksums. Those are not supported with the current release 5.3 and older. This means version 5.4 needs to be released close to the GA of RHEL6, otherwise customers are not able to manage RHEL6 systems internally.

Support for Oracle 11g databases (on external servers)
Right now, only Oracle 10g databases are supported on external servers. This is annoying for customers that already ditched Oracle 10g and upgraded all Databases to 11g. This new feature allows to have a homogeneous database landscape in the datacenter.

Orphaned profile elimination to prevent wasting entitlement
Today when re-provisioning a system, the system gets registered and entitled twice, the old system-profile needs to get deleted manually. Often this gets forgotten and wastes entitlements. In RHN Satellite 5.4 there will be a function to detects those duplicate system registrations.

Runs on RHEL6
The upstream project Spacewalk runs fine on Tomcat6, which will be included in RHEL6. It is quite unlikely that the Sat distribution comes with an own Tomcat5.5 server, so it means that the support for Tomcat6 was backported from Spacewalk.

Recording of the install-date of packages
This small feature is quite important for a lot of users. In some industries there are regulations to know when a particular package was installed. Of course you can get this information out of the systems /var/log/yum.log, but now you will have this information handy on your Satellite server.

Open Questions
There is a Bugzilla tracking bug for RHN Satellite version 5.3.1. What is it good for? Will there be support for RHEL6? My guess is not having RHEL6 support and 5.3.1 will be ditched even before its got released.

Will RHN Satellite 5.4 will also run on RHEL5? Maybe the distribution comes with Tomcat6 packages for RHEL5? Maybe Sat540 will be able to run with Tomcat5.5? We will see…

Upgrade scenarios: Will it be easy to upgrade from 5.3? Is it needed to refresh the OS from RHEL5 to RHEL6? If it is that easy as upgrade from i.e. Spacewalk 1.0 to Spacewalk 1.1 then we all will be happy

Release Date
As always, Red Hat does neither publish a roadmap nor release dates. All we know for RHEL6 is “later this year” and thats also true for the release of RHN Satellite 5.4.

Conclusion
The gap between Spacewalk 1.1 and RHN Satellite 5.3 is quite huge. Lots of new and interesting features have been introduced, lots of bugs fixed, much better performance. With the upcoming release of version 5.4 this gap will be much smaller.

In contrary to the release of 5.3 which was quite buggy on GA, I do not expect the same for 5.4 because Spacewalk seems to be very stable at the moment. This makes me confident that 5.4 will be a very stable version from GA on.

Have fun!

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Tags: RHEL6, RHN Satellite, Spacewalk, System Management
Posted in Red Hat | No Comments »

Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

Friday, 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!

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Tags: KVM, Red Hat, RHEL, RHEL6, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized, Virtualization | 2 Comments »

RHEL6 Beta2 – experiences so far

Saturday, 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.

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Tags: Red Hat, RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Red Hat released RHEL6 Beta 2!

Wednesday, 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

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Tags: RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized | No Comments »

What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not

Tuesday, 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

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Tags: RHEL, RHEL6, Virtualization
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization | 4 Comments »

RHEL6 as a web server

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

New software versions

Today I’m writing about the changes and benefits of RHEL6 as a web server compared to RHEL5. Red Hat is well known for its stable API and ABI over the life-cycle of a major release. For some usage types this is a major problem. Sticking to old version of PHP, MySQL, Tomcat you-name-it-piece-of-software is problematic since web applications are rapidly changing its requirements.

Instead of PHP 5.1.6, RHEL6 ships almost up-to-date PHP 5.3.1. Which is good, since web applications such as TYPO3 require PHP 5.3 to be able to install security bug fixes.
The Apache httpd comes in Version 2.2.14 instead of 2.2.3. Since Apache is not very actively developed further, it does not matter anyway.
MySQL is shipped with an almost-up-to-date version 5.1.42 vs. 5.0.77. No big deal.
Tomcat is being installed with version 6.0.20 instead of the very old 5.5 in RHEL5. This brings quite some benefits for Java web developers.
Nothing has changed since RHEL5.5 so far for PostgreSQL. Since RHEL5.5 Red Hat ships version 8.4 in addition to 8.1.
Python got upgraded from 2.3 to 2.6 which probably allows to run more Python based web applications.
Unfortunately still no appearance of GraphicsMagick as a replacement for ImageMagick.
New: Ships with APC (Alternative PHP Cache). This is useful for LAMP servers with loads of traffic and helps to get response time below critical values.

Unlike other distributions, Red Hat’s default DocumentRoot is still in /var/www instead of /srv/www. From my point of view the /var should be used for libraries and similar stuff, but not for application data. This ends up in creating symlinks like it was before.

From the “I-dont-like-bloated-systems” Departement

Looks like Red Hat made a huge progress in making its system less bloated. In Versions up to RHEL5 you can experience strange package dependencies.

PHP and friends: While on RHEL5 a “yum install php” automatically selects PostgreSQL-libs and gmp to install, nothing like this happens on RHEL6.
Tomcats dependencies went down from 48 packages to only 15.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, Red Hat made a good job to enable RHEL as a web server again. The fundamental problem is still the same: In two years RHEL6 will be completely outdated and not useful for modern web application, like it is today with RHEL5. Of course you can compile the stuff by yourself, but then you’ll get a maintenance problem.

Red Hat should think about something similar like Debian’s “volatile” repository. It provides upgraded software which would otherwise be useless in a two years or older versions. I’m looking forward for a “Red Hat Volatile” Channel on our satellites.

Feedback is welcome…

Have fun!

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Tags: Apache, RHEL, RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Uncategorized, Web Servers and Applications | 5 Comments »

A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

As promised yesterday, I publish the results of a brief test of RHEL6 Beta 1 and the most important findings. It is my point of view as a system guys daily business. If not stated, this overview is based on a default installation with no customization.

General

There are new package groups such as “Minimal” with 228 Packages and “Basic Server” with 523 Packages. “Basic Server” is the default installation, which means the default click trough installation compared to RHEL5 is much less bloated.

The versions of the most important software is quite up-to-date but as expected not on the bleeding edge.

ext4 is the default file system. Hopefully the fsync issues are solved. See more here: http://lwn.net/Articles/322823/

Postfix is the default MTA. Finally Red Hat managed to switch away from sendmail like other distributions did it years ago.

Bye bye SysV init: As I guesstimated in october 2009 RHEL6 comes with upstart instead of traditional SysV init. (See http://blog.delouw.ch/2009/10/31/ready-to-upstart/). The boot process is much faster compared to RHEL5. Upstart comes with legacy support for traditional runcontrol scripts in /etc/init.d.

Still too many services enabled after default install. Generally unneeded services like avahi/mDNS and NFS-related daemons such as portmap are still enabled by default.

Virtualization

As expected, Xen was removed completely from RHEL6. These is being discussed controversial. Why not providing both virtualization solutions as before? Recently Citrix released Xen4 which works well together with Kernel 2.6.32, the same version as used by RHEL6.

KVM and its friends made a huge step forward. lib-virt, virt-manager and stuff is nearly up-to-date with the upstream versions. Means: The virtualization infrastructure made a lot of progress. Installing RHEL6 as a KVM guest works great. All drivers needed (virtio) are automatically installed.

A major good message to people which are using VMware vPhere 4 is that RHEL 6 comes which native support of vmxnet3 which was obviously backported from Kernel 2.6.33. Vmxnet3 is the driver for VMware’s para-virt NIC which brings quite some performance enhancements and lower CPU usage on the ESX host.

Certifications from ISVs

A quick check (not actually tested) for the requirements for SAP and Oracle shows that those are fulfilled already. We can expect the certification quite soon after GA of RHEL6. [update] Some compatibility RPMs from the mid 1990′s disappeared. I now need to figure out if they are *really* needed by Oracle and/or SAP[/update]

Integration with Cobbler

Integration with cobbler works like expected, cobbler import –patch=/mnt –name=rhel6 and you are done. For a quick test I just copied the kickstart template from RHEL5 and I’m not sure if this is a good method. A test-install on ESX4 failed, the system hung at the creating of the root-VG. Not sure yet if it is a bug or something is incompatible in the kickstart. [update] The system hung was because of out-of-memory. The test-installation was on a ESX guest with 384Mbyte of memory which is enough according to the documentation but too little in real life. Growing the RAM of the test system to 512Mybte helped, but some packages needed by for SAP have changes names or disappeared. After changing/removing those RPMs, the installation went smoothly[/update]

Bugs or features?

I detected some oddities where I’m not sure if it is a bug or a feature. We will see whats going on on http://bugzilla.redhat.com.

No network configured after default install. At the moment you need to configure it manually (considered a Bug)
I detected a major security issue during install, I’m not going to disclose it before a patch is available or more information from Red Hat is made available. I reported it 2010-04-23 ~12:00 on Red Hats bugzilla bugtracker. [update] The bug gots assigned to a Red Engineer after three hours, seems like Red Hat is acting very professional on the case[/update]

Conclusion

After this brief test one can say that RHEL6 will be a really great Linux Distribution for enterprise servers. The beta is already very stable with few bugs detected from my side. My guesstimate is that mid of May 2010 there will be a second public beta released, lets stay tuned, I’ll keep you up-to-date with further findings.

Have fun!

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Tags: ESX, Linux, RHEL6, Upstart, Virtualization
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization, Web Servers and Applications | 2 Comments »

RHEL 6 public beta released

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Red announced the first public beta release of its next Enterprise Linux.

It can be downloaded at Red Hats FTP Server.

You can expect a brief test later this day.

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Tags: Linux, RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat | No Comments »

Roadmaps on the Red Hat Summit 2010 in Boston

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Finally Red Hat disclosed the agenda of its summit in 2010. For more informations see http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/agenda/.

RHEL6?

Tim Burke of Red Hat will talk about the new features of RHEL6. It sounds like the present, not the future. Does this mean I’m right with my guess that RHEL6 will be released end of June like I wrote in earlier blog article?

Roadmaps

Count how many times the word “Roadmap” appears in the agenda. It seems to get even more interesting what Red Hat plans to do. But it is still unsure what kind of new features we can expect in RHEL6. Red Hat just disclosed some snippets of RHEL6 again, this is called Salami-Tactic.

Where is the commitment?

We (the RHEL community) are still missing a clear commitment to us as customers. Only little is known about RHEL 6

Love or hate?

Should the RHEL community love or hate Red Hat? At the end of the day I like Red Hat, they do a lot for the progress of Linux in general and Linux in enterprises in particular. Anyway: Not providing a roadmap makes me and possibly others too very angry. Such a roadmap does not need to necessarily be in detail.

Have fun! Really? Soon we will have!

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Tags: Linux, Red Hat, RHEL, RHEL6
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization | No Comments »

Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Still no official informations

Red Hat is still refusing any questions about the features of RHEL 6 and its Linux Kernel. However: Since Vanilla Kernel 2.6.33 vmxnet3 and pvscsi is supported. Fedora 13 Alpha 3 is shipped with a derivate of Kernel 2.6.33.

I still hope that Red Hat is switching to 2.6.33 or back-porting the VMWare code to its 2.6.32 derivative Kernel as known by RHEL 6 Alpha 3.

Experiences with F13a3 so far

Installing F13a3 on a ESX guest – with RHEL5 as “supported Guest OS” – and enabled vmxnet “enhanced” plus pvscsci as HBA was a smooth experience. No driver disk was needed, no dirty fixes. Just selecting vmxnet3 as NIC and PVSCSCI as disk HBA. Thats the way RHEL6 should work from my point of view.

RHEV vs. VMWare ESX

Since Red Hat released its visualization solution “RHEV”, VMWare and Red Hat are competitors. Is Red Hat willing to include ESX support in its Enterprise Products? My guess is to not to do so, but I’m open for surprises.

The goals

The goal on the long term is to switch from ESX to KVM. However, if you deployed a large ESX farm already and the management members are members of the “ESX-Church” it will be hard.

The mid-term goal is to get rid of those crappy VMWare tools. The current state of this “Tools” definitively proves that VMWare is a Windows shop and does not take care about Linux virtualization.

Will we have fun? Depends on EMC and Red Hat….

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Tags: ESX, KVM, Linux, RHEL, RHEL6, Virtualization, VMware
Posted in Linux, Red Hat, Virtualization | No Comments »

Luc de Louw's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘RHEL6’

rhn satellite 5.4 release in sight

Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

RHEL6 Beta2 – experiences so far

Red Hat released RHEL6 Beta 2!

What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not

RHEL6 as a web server

A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1

RHEL 6 public beta released

Roadmaps on the Red Hat Summit 2010 in Boston

Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3

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