Call for testing: DRBD 8.3 in Jaunty

As mentioned by Ante Karamatic DRBD has been updated to the latest version in Jaunty. 8.3 brings in some interesting new features:

• support for devices bigger than 4 TBytes
• checksum based resynchronization to speed up resync processes over slow networks
• support for stacked resource
• RedHat cluster suite (rgmanager) integration scripts

Now that both the kernel module and the userspace tools have been updated DRBD is ready to be tested in Jaunty. Ante wrote up test instructions in a wiki page. Following his instructions and reporting the results is a great way to contribute to the Ubuntu Server team and help shaping the next release. If you’re already using DRBD in a specific environment and have access to a test setup we’d love to hear if this new version works well in your infrastructure. Let us know of your findings at the next Ubuntu Server Team meeting or on our mailing list: ubuntu-server@lists.ubuntu.com.

Server Team 20090127 meeting minutes

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

SRU for ebox

mathiaz reported that ebox 0.12 had been uploaded to Jaunty. The intrepid SRU process can be moved forward. Bug 273486, bug 255368 and bug 314606 are marked Fix Released for Jaunty. The next step is to prepare debdiffs for the intrepid packages.

ACTION: sommer to prepare new debdiffs for the ebox intrepid SRU.

ACL by default

ACTION: ivoks to create a wiki page to keep track of ACL support in packages.

DRBD in jaunty

ivoks announced that the drbd userspace tools had been merged in Jaunty. DRBD 8.3.0 is now working in Jaunty. mathiaz suggested to write up a wiki page to outline testing instructions.

ACTION: ivoks to write a wiki page for conducting DRBD testing under https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Cases/

Screen profiles

kirkland stated that screen-profiles was in main as a Recommend from the screen package. He also asked what should we do with the default /etc/screenrc. After some discussion it was decided to implement a screen-profile selector that would prompt the user to choose a screen profile the first time screen is run. The workflow would be similar to the sensible-editor choice.

nealmcb updated the ServerGUI wiki page with the latest information about screen and screen-profiles.

ACTION: kirkland to implement a screen-profiles selection tool

ACTION: nealmcb to update the screen factoids

EtcUnderRevisionControl status

Koon gave a quick update on the EtcUnderRevisionControl specification. The implementation is based on improving etckeeper and its bzr plugin to be a little more user-friendly. Koon created an LP project as well as a LP team to organize work done on this topic. He is waiting for the blueprint to be approved.

ACTION: dendrobates to review the etc-under-revision-control blueprint

Server Team Bug Days

zul asked if we should run Server Team bug days. mathiaz said that there had been one Server Team Bug day organized almost 2 years ago. The next step would be to get in touch with the Bug team to get a Server Team bug day setup.

Encrypted private/home with filename encryption available

kirkland announced that the new ecryptfs-utils-69 package enabled filename encryption if the kernel supported it. This feature is only available on new installs. kirkland is working on a script to handle live migration for existing systems.

kirland mentioned that he’d like to get encrypted swap working. He hopes to get a script in Jaunty to help setting up a system to use encrypted swap. Chances to get this feature integrated in the installer for Jaunty are slim.

ACTION: kirkland to make a call for testing filename encryption via a blog post.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, February 3rd at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

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

Mail services

dkim was added during the Intrepid release cycle. Work keeps being done by Scott Kitterman to keep the milter support up-to-date: dkim-milter, pymilter, pymilter-milters have been updated to the latest upstream version in Jaunty.

Virtualisation

Soren Hansen has uploaded a new version of the libvirt package. Amongst bug fixes the version available in Jaunty brings support for openvz. A patch to support opennebula has also been added but is not enabled yet. The related tool virt-viewer has also been updated and provides a Mozilla plugin package. The tools used to interact with EC2 have been updated to the latest version released by Amazon while the latest version of virtualbox-ose made its way to the Jaunty archive. The 2.1 version brings better support for 64 bit systems as well as full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots.

Collaboration tools

moinmoin has been updated to a new major version. The 1.8 version brings in a major GUI editor upgrade, a new theme in addition to the usual round of bug fixes.

Databases

MySQL 5.0.75 is available in main while MySQL 5.1.30 is in universe. Some more work is still needed to make the latter fully working. One of the new feature provided by MySQL 5.1 is the embedded server library. libmysqld is already used by the new version of the Amarok music player shipped by the Kubuntu team in Jaunty.

Clustering support

redhat-cluster has been updated to the latest alpha2 release of the 3.0 branch. This soon-to-be-stable third generation of the code includes a new conga interface – the graphical tool to manage clusters. Related dependencies such as openais and corosync have also been updated.

Screen-profiles

Multiple uploads include the work done by Dustin Kirkland and Nicolas Barcet. After some discussions on the ubuntu-server mailing the default escape sequence has been changed back to ctrl-a. A few scripts have also been added to provide more information: a memory count script and a load average script. The common key bindings are using the F-keys to ensure that they work in both gnome-terminal and the tty console. A screen-profile-helper has been added to allow the selection of profiles as well as to install screen by default.

Squid proxy

The default configuration has been updated to better support apt repository caching: the cached object size has been increased so that big packages are properly cached. The Release and the Package file are also kept for a longer period of time.

Tomcat6

The tomcat6 package has seen the addition of a webapp auto-deployment feature to handle application load and unloads. One of the consequence is that installing webapp packages doesn’t stop tomcat6 processes anymore.

Uncomplicated Firewall

The 0.26 version has seen the addition of a new REJECT functionality. debconf questions have also been added to enable the firewall and set some basic rules. This is the first step towards integration of ufw in the installer.

Server Team 20090120 meeting minutes

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

Screen profiles

kirkland reported that he had uploaded a new version of the screen-profiles package to universe which changes the default escape sequence back to ctrl-a. nijaba also implemented a new functionality to allow to customize the escape sequence when choosing the screen profile. Now that the main inclusion report has been accepted kirkland is planning to seed the screen-profile by making it a dependency of the screen package.

kirkland plans to start a discussion about enabling screen by default on server installs. He will outline the implementation details in a post to the ubuntu-server mailing list to start gathering feedback on the idea.

ACTION: kirkland to seed screen-profiles in main as dependency of screen.

ACTION: kirkland to ask on ubuntu-server@ for screen by default on login.

ACTION: nijaba to provide a way to customize the escape sequence when configuring screen profiles.

SRU for ebox

sommer and foolano reported that the SRU for intrepid is waiting for the upload of new packages to jaunty. Bugs have been filed and added to the universe sponsorship queue.

ACTION: mathiaz to look into ebox packages for jaunty sponsoring.

MySQL 5.1 in jaunty

mathiaz looked into the state of the mysql-dsfg-5.1 package in jaunty. For now mysql-server-5.1 is not installable because the skip-bdb option is used in the configuration file (which is part of the mysql-common (from mysql-dfsg-5.0) package). He also asked the Debian MySQL maintainers about their plans: Lenny will ship 5.0 while the next Debian release would ship 5.1 only. As a consequence they don’t have a huge interest in supporting both 5.0 and 5.1 in the archive. mathiaz added that doing so in a way similar to postgresql packages would require a significant amount of work on both mysql-dfsg-5.{01} packages. Implementing such an infrastructure would lead to being able to run both 5.0 and 5.1 at the same time in one system.

ACTION: mathiaz to ask the Debian maintainers opinion on supporting both 5.0 and 5.1 using an infrastructure similar to postgresql.

ACTION: mathiaz to look in other ways to fix 5.1 in jaunty.

ACL by default

ivoks reported that he had sent patches to add support for ACL to tar to the Debian maintainer. The answer was to wait for upstream to integrate the patches. Other packages may require to be modified to support ACL: cpio, zip.

ACTION: ivoks to create wiki page to keep track of ACL support in packages

DRBD in jaunty

ivoks announced that his DRBD patches had been applied by the Ubuntu kernel team. Once the new kernel is uploaded he will merge DRBD 8.3.0. Testing will be welcome at that time.

ACTION: ivoks to merge DRBD 8.3.0 userspace tools once the kernel has been uploaded.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, January 27th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Server Team 20090113 meeting minutes

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

Screen Profiles

kirland announced that he uploaded a new version of the screen-profiles package to jaunty. Versions for hardy and intrepid are also available from his PPA. He stated that it was totally awesome now and posted a screenshot. He is looking for more testers.

ACTION: kirkland to write a blog post about screen-profile

SRU for ebox

sommer reported that all the bugs had been updated and submitted to the motu-sru team. zul uploaded relevant packages to intrepid-proposed which are waiting for the ACK from the motu-sru team.

libmysqlclient-dev package (MySQL 5.1) in jaunty

mathiaz reported that libmysqlclient15-dev is currently a transitional package depending on libmysqlclient-dev. Both packages are provided by mysql-dsfg-5.1. Unfortunately that breaks builds in main that depends on libmysqlclient15-dev since mysql-dfsg-5.1 is in universe. For now MySQL 5.0 is still the preferred package and should stay in main while MySQL 5.1 is part of universe.

After some discussion it was decided to upload a new version of mysql-dfsg-5.1 that would provide libmysqlclient16-dev instead of libmysqlclient{,15-dev}. libmysqlclient16-dev won’t provide libmysqlclient-dev.

A new version of mysql-dfsg-5.0 will also be uploaded with the version 5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu1 in order to restore a working libmysqlclient15-dev package. libmysqlclient15-dev will provide libmysqlclient-dev.

ACTION: mathiaz to upload mysql packages to fix libmysqlclient{15,16,}-dev packages in jaunty

Ubuntu Server on NAS devices

persia asked what would be required to turn one of his little ARM servers into a complete NAS device. There was some discussion about which services would be provided (NFS, CIFS, SFTP) and the need for a management interface. ebox may provide the latter.

The first step however is to test whether cifs (via samba) and may be nfs are working correctly on ARM. zul mentioned that access to ARM devices was a blocker. persia volunteered to run an ARM install of Server through the test cases to check the current status and what needs to be done. He is also looking for help chasing down some of the bugs he might uncover during the process.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, January 20th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.