Server Team 20090331 meeting minutes

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

Ubuntu Server Guide

sommer reported that he received some feedback on a few sections from the Ubuntu Server Guide. However some sections still need to be reviewed: they’re listed in the wiki page. Help in reviewing them is welcomed.

NUMA support for 64bit -server kernel

cooloney brought the question of whether NUMA should be enabled on 64bit -server kernel. No objections were raised except that it may be too late for the Jaunty release cycle. This topic should be discussed for the Karmic cycle at the next UDS with the Kernel team.

Ubuntu on EC2

zul gave a report on the state of Ubuntu on EC2. The next beta image based on Intrepid is being worked on. Next in the pipeline is an image based on Hardy and the 2.6.24 kernel. An image based on Jaunty and the 2.6.28 kernel is also being planned. Each new release will be announced on the ec2-beta mailing list.

Bugs from Jaunty Beta

mathiaz reminded that with the release of Jaunty Beta last Thursday the number of new bugs filed had raised. Any help in triaging them is welcomed. The list of new bugs related to the Ubuntu Server team is a good place to start any triaging effort.

Bacula testing

ivoks asked for more testing and bug triaging on the bacula package.

RHCS support

ivoks raised the question of whether Red Hat Cluster Suite should be kept in main in Karmic. Fabio M. Di Nitto, the current maintainer, mentioned he had less and less time to maintain the package and was looking for some help. mathiaz suggested to discuss this topic at the next UDS. Meanwhile ivoks will make sure rhcs is in good shape for Jaunty.

Agree on next meeting date and time

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

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

Since we entered FeatureFreeze one and half month ago the Ubuntu developers have shifted their focus on fixing bugs. As such the archive hasn’t seen a lot of new package versions or shiny new features. Here are a few highlights from the archive that happened during last month:

Python 2.6 transition

One of the main focus of the MOTU team has been conducting the python 2.6 transition. Scott Kitterman and other MOTUs have uploaded numerous packages to the archive in order to get ready for python 2.6 in Jaunty.

Loads of bug fixes

Most of the uploads have been fixing bugs: bacula packages can now be installed successfully in Jaunty. The samba package has been updated twice to new upstream versions to fix the broken ‘force group’ option as well as saving files on Samba shares using MS Office 2007.

Karmic is known in Jaunty

Some packages have been updated to  know about the next release codenamed Karmic Koala. Lintian, vim and other developers packages in Jaunty won’t complain when karmic will show up in Changelogs and other places once the release cycle opens.

Ubuntu in the cloud

In the realm of cloud computing things are moving fast.

Ubuntu on EC2 saw another beta released. ec2-init is now accepting more options such as disabling the root account and supporting RightScale managed instances. The EC2 API tools have also been packaged: managing EC2 instances using command lines tools is just a package installation away in Jaunty.

Eucalyptus, which helps to build private clouds using Ubuntu, saw a handful of bug fixes by Soren Hansen: better support for EBS in KVM, compression for image transfers are amongst the improvements. Collaboration with the upstream developers is working well as Ubuntu patches are integrated in new bzr snapshots.

kvm saw a packaging cleanup: Dustin Kirkland dug through the patches and kept the relevant ones while removing obsoletes patches. Builds on lpia and ia64 have also been enabled. DKMS support has been improved so that the kvm kernel module available from the kvm-source package can be easily updated.

likewise-open5 in universe

Likewise-open make it a snap to integrate an Ubuntu system in an AD environment. Thierry Carrez uploaded the latest version to the Ubuntu universe. Version 5 has seen many architectural changes: gone is the monolithic daemon – it has been replaced with a collection of daemons that handle one task. However upgrades from 4.1 to 5.0 aren’t supported. The system has to be rejoined when moving from 4.1 to 5.0. As a consequence 5.0 and 4.1 are available in Ubuntu with 4.1 in main and 5.0 in universe.

MySQL 5.0 to 5.1 upgrades

Even though MySQL 5.0 is still the supported version in Ubuntu, MySQL 5.1 is already available in universe. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 is now possible in Jaunty thanks to the work of Mathias Gug.

screen-profiles

Dustin Kirkland has been busy updating the screen-profiles package. The ec2-cost script has been fine-tuned while a new package, screen-profiles-extra, has been created to ship additional color profiles.

Server Team 20090324 meeting minutes

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

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

kirkland posted the promised blog post asking for testing of kvm 84 backport to hardy with specific instructions on how-to setup kvm 84 from the ubuntu-virt PPA. He received some feedback and noted that some bugs might require to backport libvirt as well.

Other progress reports on Roadmap items

sommer reported the creation of new sections in the Server Guide: Eucalyptus and Opennebula. He welcomes feedback on those chapters (and on all other chapters), especially before StringFreeze which is Thursday, March 26.

Beta release coming up

ttx reminded the audience of the upcoming Beta release and encouraged everyone to participate in the ISO testing process, especially the owners of real server hardware.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, March 31st at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Likewise Open 5.0 available in Jaunty

By popular demand, Likewise Open 5.0 – which provides authentication services for Active Directory Domains  – is now available in Jaunty! This release brings key improvements through a complete rewrite of the underlying services:

• New threaded authentication service (lsassd) results in improved system responsiveness under heavy load, faster online/offline detection for mobile users
• Inclusion of idmap compatibility plugins for Samba 3 file and print servers
• DCE/RPC support for TCP, UDP, and Named Pipes transports
• New auditing and logging service (eventlogd) using sqlite3 as the storage engine
• New domain controller location service (netlogond)

This was released in Jaunty as a separate set of packages named likewise-open5. The reason behind this was that Likewise Open does not support (yet) upgrading from 4.1 to 5.0 without forcing systems to rejoin the domain. Since this operation requires Windows Domain Administrator credentials that may or may not be available at upgrade time it was considered better to let the two versions co-exist in 9.04, with likewise-open (4.1) in main and likewise-open5 (5.0) in universe.

Try it out by running:

sudo apt-get install likewise-open5

Warning: If likewise-open is already installed this will result in the removal of the Likewise Open 4.1 packages and make the system leave the AD domain! Both 4.1 and 5.0 should behaves the same way. An Active Directory domain can be joined using the GUI (likewise-open5-gui) or the CLI tool:

sudo domainjoin-cli join test-ad.company.com Administrator AdminPassword

The likewise-open5 packages are quite new and have been added late in the release process. Testing and reporting any bugs (especially regressions fro 4.1) to Launchpad is welcome!

Server Team 20090317 meeting minutes

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

KVM backport in hardy

kirkland asked for some assistance testing a kvm-84 package that he prepared for hardy. It’s available in ubuntu-virt PPA. The goal is to prepare an SRU for hardy. There was some discussions about the best way to conduct testing as the new version contains security fixes. It was suggested to go through the following workflow: ~ubuntu-virt PPA -> hardy-backports -> hardy-{proposed|security} -> hardy-updates.

ACTION: kirkland to write a blog post asking for testing of kvm 84 backport to hardy with specific instructions on how-to setup kvm 84 from the ubuntu-virt PPA

likewise-open 5 in jaunty

ttx reported that a FF Exception had been granted to likewise-open-5 and he had uploaded the package. He added that this was a new separate package from the likewise-open 4.1 packages as the upgrade from 4.1 to 5.0 required to leave the domain and rejoin it. So Likewise Open 5 will coexist with Likewise Open 4.1 in Jaunty. For the Karmic cycle we’ll work with upstream to propose a seamless upgrade for all users to the latest version and phase out 4.1. There was some discussion about the best way to document that behavior: the Ubuntu Server Guide and the Debian.News file seemed to be the most appropriate locations.

screen-profiles by default

kirkland brought up the question of installing screen-profiles by default on EC2 instances and thus running screen by default when logging into an EC2 system. zul, soren and ehammond1 already discussed it and were against. There were some concerns about overlapping key bindings. The discussion was deferred to the next release cycle.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, March 24th at 15:00 UTC in #ubuntu-server.