Server Team 20081028 meeting minutes

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

iscsi in intrepid

mathiaz reported that iscsi in intrepid does not support connecting to more than one target at the same time. The issue is a mismatch between the kernel and the user space version. kirkland prepared a fix by using the latest version from upstream. The release team decided to not include it in the release and to get it fixed via a Stable Release Update. A section covering this issue will also be added to the Release Notes.

Server FAQ

nijaba noticed that the Server FAQ was outdated. He asked for help to start updating the page. sommer offered his help and will start by listing the questions that the FAQ should answer.

ACTION: sommer and nijaba to review the list of questions to be included in the Server FAQ.

Ubuntu “easy server” for the home user

xivulon presented his thoughts on creating a dumbed down web interface for home users. He created a wiki page to present his ideas. nealmcb pointed to an idea in brainstorm covering a similar topic. mathiaz mentioned the Server Flavor spec written by ScottK. More discussion will probably take place during UDS.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Due to the time change it was decided to move the meeting one hour back to 16:00 UTC.

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, November 4th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20081021 meeting minutes

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

python-vm-builder

mathiaz reported he had performed a lot of testing of python-vm-builder. Most of the bugs found have been fixed by nijaba. soren said he was catching up with the commits to the trunk branch and planned to upload a new version before release.

iscsi support for interpid

kirkland looked into fixing existing bugs but it was decided that it was too late in the cycle to try fixing them. Work on iscsi has been deferred to the next cycle.

Iso testing

mathiaz reported that testing for the RC images had started. The ISO testing tracker is used to coordinate testing results. There are now 14 test cases listed for the 2 -server isos. Help is welcome.

mathiaz reported that his raid install test cases were failing. He asked for help in doing manual raid installation testing. sommer and kirkland offered to look into the issue.

ubuntu-server-devel channel

nijaba brought up the subject of creating a new ubuntu-server-devel channel. The identified problem was that ignoring user support requests while developers were discussing other issues in the channel seemed rude to the end users. After some discussion it turned out that creating an ubuntu-server-devel channel would not solve the problem.

UDS topics

mathiaz announced that ideas for the next UDS should be added to the IdeaPool wiki page of the Server Team so that they could be taken into account when the list of topics for the next UDS would be prepared.

Replacing Frozen Bubble in Jaunty

During the Open Discussion zul stated that he was planning on packaging blub blub as a replacement for the popular Frozen Bubble program. That lead to strong opposition from other meeting attendees: kirkland stated that it better be *damn* good, if it’s to replace FB while nijaba raised some concerns about the blub license not being GPL friendly. The atmosphere was on the brink of war as kirkland was drawing his slingshot back while nijaba was loading mentos. mathiaz suggested that a full day of UDS should be dedicated to this hot topic. The situation went back under control when zul reconsidered his position.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 29th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20081014 meeting minutes

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

KVM

kirkland reported he had been chasing down the virtio disk bug. It seems to be related to grub: grub-install writes a broken bootloader to the disk. He is looking into the bug and may ask for help.

mathiaz reported that the virtio network bug had been fixed. The installer correctly detects network interfaces attached to a virtio device.

JeOS

mathiaz reported that a new option had been added to the installer: Install a minimal virtual machine. The -virtual flavour has also been promoted to main and is seeded in the -server isos.

mathiaz asked which host environments were supported. ESX and kvm are fully supported. After some discussion it turned out that Xen was also supported and should work. He also wondered if someone had access to ESX and Xen to test the new installer option and the -virtual kernel. nijaba said that the QA team may have access to an ESX environment.

python-vm-builder

nijaba asked for sponsoring of the trunk branch as it contains several bug fixes. He implemented some missing functions to support xen and is looking for testers. Both ESX and xen environments require some testing.

ACTION: mathiaz to look at sponsoring python-vm-builder.

ebox

mathiaz reported that an FFexception request still had to be filed for ebox. The packages can be found in the ebox PPA. ivoks volunteered to take a look at the packages.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 21st at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20081007 meeting minutes

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

Review ServerGuide for Intrepid

sommer updated the virtualization parts of the server guide: the vmbuilder and JeOS sections have been merged. Most of the content has now been updated for the Intrepid release.

ACTION: mathiaz to update the support section

Ubuntu vm builder

nijaba has updated the tutorial. In the process a couple of bugs have been found. Most of them are minor though.

KVM

kirkland triaged a lot of kvm and libvirt bugs and stated that kvm seemed to be working better than it ever had in intrepid. mathiaz asked about support for virtio block devices. kirkland hasn’t tested that use case yet.

Ubuntu Server Survey

nijaba reported that the ubuntu server survey had reached 3000 responses. The launch plan has also been completed.

DRBD

ivoks nailed down the issue with DRBD in intrepid. The userspace tools have to be upgraded to 8.2.6 to match the kernel module version. A FFexception request has been prepared.

mathiaz asked if the collaboration with the Kernel Team on DRBD could be improved. Whenever the kernel module is updated in the Ubuntu kernels the user space tools also need to be updated. ivoks mentioned that the packaging of the userspace tools should be improved during the next release cycle. mathiaz suggested to discuss this issue during the next UDS.

Bacula SRU

ivoks fixed the bacula segfault in hardy. One tester reported that it was working correctly now.

ACTION: zul to look into SRUing bacula sigsegv – bug 227613

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 14th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

September in the archive – a view from the Ubuntu Server Team

September has been a busy month in terms of milestones: alpha5 and alpha6 were pushed out of the door. And a BetaFreeze went in effect during the last week of the month. Here is a selection of what happened in the archive during the month of September.

clamav protected by apparmor

The clamav anti-virus package saw the addition of an apparmor profile to increase the protection of the virus scanning daemon.

freeradius 2.1

A new upstream release of freeradius made its way to the intrepid archive. Support for ipv6, virtual servers and an improved administration tool are some of the new features. The server core has also been rewritten to be event based. This resulted in fixing lots of bugs that were difficult to address in the 1.1.X version.

Virtualization

A helper script that checks if the hardware supports virtualization extensions has been added to the kvm package. Support for hal and policykit has also been integrated thus improving the kvm experience in a desktop environment.

Both  kvm and qemu have been fixed to use evdev for keycode mapping based on the code from gtk-vnc. That lead to the resolution of a particular bug causing grief to kvm users, namely the unfortunate loss of ability to use arrow keys, function keys, and any other sort of extended keys.

vm-builder has seen an big update to its documentation as well as support for creating vmware and xen images.

AD integration with likewise-open

Likewise-open has been integrated with the new pam-auth-update infrastructure available in Intrepid. likewise-open is also able to properly register DDNS entries on domain join.

Boot in degraded mode

The final integration work for boot in degraded mode has been done: the installer asks whether the system should be set to boot from a degraded array if the /boot partition is located on an mirrored array.

Landscape integration

The landscape client has been split in two packages: a -common package that is installed by default. It does not require a landscape account and provides system monitoring information in the motd (via the update-motd package). Here is a example of the information included in the motd:

  System information as of Tue Oct  7 15:32:45 EDT 2008

  System load: 0.79              Memory usage: 54%   Processes:       56
  Usage of /:  30.3% of 5.60GB   Swap usage:   0%    Users logged in: 1

  Graph these measurements at https://landscape.canonical.com

The -client package is used with a Landscape account. Registration of the system with Landscape is now available at installation time when selecting the package update policy.

Status action for init scripts

Another round of packages have seen a status action added to their init script: openvpn, asterisk, mythtv and net-snmp.

Tomcat5.5

Following the work done on the tomcat6 package, tomcat5.5 has also been updated to integrate nicely with the intrepid java environment. And security fixes have been applied to the package.