Server Team 20090630 meeting minutes

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online with the irc logs here.

Hadoop

ttx created a draft spec document where he copied his notes on Hadoop packaging: the analysis of the dependencies that would need to be packaged and a review of the current Hadoop deb packaging by Cloudera. Anyone interested in packaging Hadoop can take the spec (and blueprint) from here to make it a reality.

Asterisk

jmdault confirmed that the target for karmic should be Asterisk 1.6, as there is not so much interest around in keeping 1.4. Upstream in particular doesn’t commit to any particular stable version. jmdault will start working on a 1.6 version of his DKMS-enabled Asterisk packaging.

ACTION: jmdault to start packaging asterisk 1.6+dkms

ubuntu-tips

nijaba created a wikipage and asked for comments about it. He reported no strong reaction against it from the community, more of an approval. The next step is to create an ubuntu-tips package, even if there aren’t many tips so far on the page, as they can be added later. ttx asked about rules on what makes an acceptable tip, and nijaba will add proposed rules to the wikipage. ttx also pointed out the need to be able to follow-up on some tips, so rules on what would make a good external reference link are also needed.

ACTION: nijaba to add rules detailing what makes a relevant tip and what’s not

Review progress made on specifications listed on the Roadmap

ttx commented that the current ServerTeam/Roadmap document is slightly out of date, so a general overhaul of that page seems to be needed. This should be discussed as a specific agenda point in the next meeting, so that everyone can prepare to the discussion.

ACTION: ttx to add Roadmap Review to next meeting agenda

As far as KarmicReleaseSchedule is concerned, please note that we passed DebianImportFreeze last week, so now syncs from Debian are subject to specific sync requests. Next milestone is Alpha3 release on July 23.

Open Discussion

alexm reported multiple recent requests about monitoring tools. zul mentioned nagios as the recommended tool, but alexm noticed that there wasn’t any mention of it in the Server Guide. sommer indicated that there is a nagios section in the Karmic Server Guide, however the only way to access it so far is to pull the bzr branch. sommer will make sure doc.ubuntu.com is updated. alexm offered to review this section contents.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, July 7th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20090623 meeting minutes

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

DRBD

ivoks send an email with his proposal to move the DRBD module out of the kernel tree and use DKMS instead. He also started to work on new drbd packages to use dkms.

ACTION: ivoks to work on providing DRBD package using dkms

Hadoop packaging

ttx looked into the cloudera debian packages. He reported that the main issue was that it built hadoop from source but that the source contained binary JARs. These JAR must first be packaged separately.

The list of projects to be packaged are:

• jets3t
• kfs
• xmlenc
• JavaXMLBuilder
• commons-cli: version 2.0

All of the existing packaging work is under the ASL-2 license. The first step to move things forward is to package the dependencies listed above.

ACTION: ttx to write down his hadoop analysis in a wiki page.

Merges

mathiaz reminded that the list of outstanding merges in main and universe is shrinking however there are still a lot of packages left. More help in merging packages is welcome.

Asterisk in Karmic

stgraber reported that the latest stable release of asterisk (1.4) had been packaged with dkms and was available from a PPA. However it was noted that version 1.6 was available from unstable. mathiaz asked which version should be targeted for karmic. The PPA is the latest stable release (1.4), Debian unstable has asterisk’s next release 1.6. More information is needed from the Debian VOIP maintainer team (wrt to supporting dkms) as well as the upstream Asterisk team.

ACTION: jmdault to research which version of asterisk should be in karmic

Discuss idea to add ubuntu-tips on motd

nijaba reported that the 7 lines of legal warning in motd could be displayed only once per admin user. kirkland has some code to handle that situation. nijaba suggested that given the reclaimed extra space, and in order to provide visibility to new or important features in Ubuntu Server Edition, we could add an ubuntu-tips package, installed by default, that would randomly display 2 lines of text at the end of the motd coming from a list of tips placed in a given directory.

There was some discussion about whether this should be done by default. The content of the tips was also mentioned: wiki page, package of the day, fortunes-debian-hints package. The next step would be to come up with a list of tips that are relevant. Implementation of the integration in Ubuntu Server can be discussed afterwards.

ACTION: nijaba to start a wiki page with proposed 2 liners.

ACTION: to send the url to the ubuntu-server@ and ask for other input

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 30th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20090616 meeting minutes

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Merges

mathiaz reminded that there was a list of merges that look easy on the Ubuntu Server team Roadmap. dholbach mentioned the sponsoring list which has a couple of packages that may be interesting to Ubuntu Server team members.

Heartbeat in Karmic

ivoks gave a brief overview of the state of the Cluster Stack in Ubuntu Karmic. The heartbeat package will be demoted to universe once pacemaker gets compiled with corosync and openais 1.0. Version 1.0 of corosync and openais should be released in the next two weeks by upstream. He also mentioned that rhcs would also be demoted to universe once pacemaker has been promoted to main. Most of the packages are available for testing from the ubuntu-ha PPA.

DRBD

ivoks proposed the idea of using DKMS to handle DRBD. This would help in backporting new versions of DRBD to stable releases (in a similar way that kirkland is using DKMS to provide a kvm backport to hardy).

ACTION: ivoks to send an email to -server and -kernel about turning drbd into a dkms based module

Hadoop packaging

ivoks reported that he received emails showing interest in having hadoop available in Ubuntu. mathiaz asked whether there were some debian packages already available somewhere – ivoks pointed to the Cloudera repository. More investigation is required.

ACTION: ttx to look at Cloudera hadoop debian packages

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 23rd at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

May in the archive: a view from the Ubuntu Server team

A few days after Jaunty was pushed out of the door the new release cycle was opened soon after. Karmic repositories were set up and syncing packages from Debian unstable started. A lot of developers were busy preparing and attending UDS in Barcelona during the month of May. It didn’t prevent them to start merging packages from Debian. Here are some highlights from the archive:

No-change rebuild to gain FORTIFY defaults

kees has been busy uploading packages for no-change rebuilds. Intrepid saw the integration of some compiler hardening which are only applied if the package is rebuilt with the new toolchain. The  goal here is to have all packages in main rebuilt by the next LTS release to gain all the fortify defaults.

MIT krb5 update

mathiaz synced the latest release of MIT kerberos from unstable. Version 1.7 brings amongst other things an improved compatibility with Microsoft Windows and the drop of version 4 of the Kerberos protocol. The upload of 1.7 also started a library transition: libkrb53 has been replaced by libkrb5-3. A lot of packages in main and universe need to be rebuilt so that krb5 1.6 can be removed from the karmic repository. The transition is still ongoing: while most of packages in main have been transitioned, universe still needs a lot of work.

pure-ftpd update

A new version of pureftpd (1.0.22) has found its way into karmic: the LDAP authentication backend now supports TLS encryption and TLS encryption is available on data channels. MySQL 5 stored procedures can now be used in the authentication process.

ufw in debian

ufw, the Ucomplicated Firewall, made his way to Debian unstable. Available since Hardy in Ubuntu ufw finally landed in Debian unstable with the help of kees. This frontend for iptables is particularly well-suited for host-based firewalls and is now available to the broader Debian community.

Server Team 20090609 meeting minutes

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Merges

mathiaz reminded that the Ubuntu Developers were now focusing on merging packages from Debian into Karmic. 104 outstanding merges in main and 196 outstanding merges in universe were waiting to be processed at the time of the meeting. Any questions about merges should be asked in #ubuntu-motu or #ubuntu-devel on Freenode.

ACTION: mathiaz to update the list of easy-merges for the Server team.

Karmic Alpha2

mathiaz reported that the next milestone for Karmic was scheduled for Thursday. The Ubuntu Server team will conduct testing of the ubuntu-server isos. Testing is coordinated via the Iso testing tracker where Alpha2 candidates will be posted for review. Once available test cases are run for each iso candidates. Help in this area over the next few days is welcomed.

Drafting specifications

mathiaz reminded that specifications should be finalized this week in time for FeatureDefinitionFreeze.

New members integration

ttx asked for a quick presentation of the different roles that could be taken as part of the Ubuntu Server Team since last week a couple of new faces attended the meeting. mathiaz gave a brief overview presenting support, bug triage, packaging, documentation as the main areas to start contributing. The GettingInvolved page in the Server Team wiki has more information on how to get started.

Heartbeat 2.99 in Karmic

RoAkSoAx announced that version 2.99 of heartbeat had been available in Debian experimental and wondered whether it should be synced in Karmic. mathiaz asked how stable 2.99 was compared to the version currently in unstable (and karmic). RoAkSoAx reported that the Cluster Resource Manager code had been removed from Heartbeat since 2.99.x and replaced by Pacemaker. The Debian maintainer team plans to upload 2.99 to unstable once the last round of testing has been done in experimental.

RoAkSoAx added that he had published package for karmic in his PPA. He plans on conducting some more testing on the packages and asked for more testing from the community as well.

ACTION: RoAkSoAx to write a test case for heartbeat

ACTION: RoAkSoAx to write a blog post for a call for testing heartbeat 2.99 from a PPA

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, June 16th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.