Over the last few days, people complained that some of my email was hitting their spam folder on gmail.com - investigation revealed that gmail.com is now exposing ipv6 based MX ( not entirely sure how long back this started, but it seems new ). And the reason my email was going down the spam route was that karan.org's SPF does not ( did not! ) have ipv6 addrs'.

Fixed now.

If anyone else is using ipv6 on their mailservers, now would be a great time to add that into the spf record for the domain.

- KB

ProjectRaindrops.net allows anyone to submit a kickstart, with a config file and get a VM image, in relatively real time. Most builds are done within 6 to 11 minutes.

It should then be fairly easy to extend this to be a delivery front for a CentOS VM Appliances marketplace / App Store / Appliance Store - where the actual definitions are stored as kickstart + config combo's and people can click through what they are looking for, to have a VM image built in the format they want, in the hypervisor they want, the disk size and format they are looking for and delivered to the place they are going to use the image, or download it directly.

Lets assume I can get this done and online fairly quickly. What then are the appliances you would like to see beyond just the generic CentOs-5/6 32bit/64bit minimal installs ?

- K

Hi,

In the last 45 days, Vault.centos.org's 2 public facing machines delivered just under 66 TiB of data. So while we try and spread this load a bit ( its growing at 25 - 35% month on month ), we've had to make a few changes.

Firstly, isos are no longer directly downloadable from vault.centos.org, you will need to go the torrent route if you want older, deprecated release isos

Secondly, we've turned off multi range requests ( httpd will still accept upto 5 range's, and then block after that )

Over the next few days, we are going to recycle some of the larger disk mirror.centos.org nodes into vault.centos.org; If someone wants to contribute to this effort, please come find us on irc.freenode.net in channel #centos-devel or #centos-mirror or tweet us @centos or email us the address mentioned at http://wiki.centos.org/Donate - but keep in mind that need machines with more than 1 TiB of usable space, and more than 300mbps of network capacity, and since we will consume that bandwidth high density hosting facilities with high contention on the links wont work.

- KB

Hi,

The first ever CentOS Dojo, a one day training and socalising day dedicated to CentOS and how people use it, will be held at Antwerp, Belgium on the 8th of Apr.

You can see the great speaker lineup on the events page at : http://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/Antwerp2013 - we have tried to cover all the major conversation areas around CentOS these days. Ranging from provisioning, management, app deployments, system and virtualisation tuning, virtual infrastructure and more.

Its going to be a great day, register up, and see you all there. And remember, there is an exclusive CentOS Dojo Tshirt for everyone who attends ( plus, there might be more goddies too ).

Jump directly to the registration page : http://centosdojoantwerp2013.eventbrite.com/

- KB

It started off by being a place that everyone could chat and talk about things that were happening in the QA cycles inside CentOS. But things have changed quite a lot - our QA cycles are a lot shorter, there is a lot more automation and there is almost no real security exposure to users.

And I think we can do this better. We can create a better end user experience that gives them direct access, easily, to the state of play within the testing. And we should be able to automate more to get better coverage.

To that aim, qaweb.dev.centos.org is now going away. And we are working on some alternatives. Starting with having a nightly QA cycle, that considers point releases and all updates upto that point. And adding more external tests as well, like the ltp content ( http://ltp.sourceforge.net/ ). If you wish to join in that effort, drop in on the centos-devel list ( http://lists.centos.org/ ) and jump right in. Ref threads: http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2013-March/009098.html and http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2013-March/009099.html

Here is a link to the official announcement that just went out : http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2013-March/019649.html

See you there,

- KB

Hi,

Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent quite a lot of time online talking with people about various things. Either using software voice over IP or google-hangout or Skype or whatever. I've noticed recently there seems to be a growing trend for people to have more and more expensive and professional Microphones for these conversations.

Awesome.

Except, get a grip. There is a limit to what and how these Mic's are meant to be used. The point at which I can hear a cat crossing the road two blocks away from your house - too much. Either get a proper sound / recording room setup, or just use that mic on the webcam or laptop. Really, its good enough for these chats.

A £250 Sennheiser Mic for this sort of a thing, not needed. Talking about the mic setup and getting the wind-blow from when you mention P, not needed. You neither sound better not look prettier. Stick to that 1bit laptop mic. We'll all be happier for it.

- KB

Hi,

https://nazar.karan.org/ services are going to be partially down as I migrate services over to a faster, more memory, lesser power consuming, many more cores machine. Everything should be back to production by midday Mar 12th, 2013. Services impacted include:

• git repos
• Reimzul's irc interface
• Alt.Bsys triggers

There is a backup instance running, so if anyone needs to get to some specific data in a rush, ping me on irc and we can get access setup.

- KB

Introducing ProjectRaindrops, a service that will build disk images for you ready to be used in your favourite cloud or virtualised environment.

One of the key barriers to entry into a cloud or virtualised environment : setting up and maintaining a piece of infrastructure that builds disk images. Its also a colossal waste of time and involves needing a complete instance of the environment one is going to deploy the image in. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a service that allowed you to drop in a kickstart file, write up a config to go with that kickstart and just build the image for you ?

Now there is. Its called ProjectRaindrops and its live, in beta mode, at http://projectraindrops.net/ ; As an initial kick off we are doing builds for HVM ( ie. any fully virtualised environment, be it KVM, Xen, VirtualBox or VMware ); With more HyperVisors and more disk formats coming soon.

Getting started is easy, goto the Raindrops website; sign in using either github or twitter credentials ( we don't store any personal details, but if your account does not have an email address, we won't be able to send out email notifications ). There are two key components:

• A config file: that contains metadata about what you want the build to do
• A kickstart file: that has the actual details on what the build should contain

Example pre-populated templates are available, just click on the new button and the template will be injected in. And there is some validation rules that track the config and kickstart file, so if you make mistakes or lose format validation, you will find out right away. And we have versioning for each file built in too. Finally, there is no real correlation between a config file and a kickstart file, when you create a new job you can pick an arbitrary kickstart and any config file in your account to match it with.

So, now that you have a config and a kickstart file, click on new job, give it a name, select which config you want to use and what kickstart file, click on 'Submit' and in a few minutes your build should be done. You can even track the job as it works its way through various stages.

Lots of interesting things in planning and development stages, stay tuned for more news in the coming weeks. For now, go ahead and drop in on http://projectraindrops.net/ and give it a shot. Just consider it to be a Beta release, so send us lots of feedback.

- KB

I'm looking to put together a development cloud - a full featured one at that, on a budget. So here is what I'm thinking about compute nodes :

• AMD FX-6 6100 AM3+ cpu
• Motherboard to go with it
• 32 GB of ram
• 180 watt PSU
• 32GB SSD for local storage

I can get one of those 'sets' for just under £190.00 ; For Network, a HP ProCurve J9028A / their 1800-24G should do, and available cheaply off ebay. For Storage, I am thinking of repurposing my HP MicroServer with 4x500GB SATA's.

So four 'compute nodes' + switch + cables and disks for the MicroServer should clock in at £1,000.00 still need some sort of a case or rails ( intend to host this at home ).

What am I missing ? What might I be better off with ? £1k for 24 cores, 128gb of ram and 4 physical nodes seems like a good deal to me, but could I do better ?

- KB

I'm going to be mostly gone from social media till the 10th Jan, during this time the best way to get in touch with me will be Email and ofcourse the phone ( reminder: +44-207-0999389 is the only number people should call! ).

Why ? Just down to the fact that I have no less than 9 projects on the go at the same time and I want to make sure that I do whatever is needed to bring as many of them towards completion by early Jan as possible. Social media is one of the bunch of things I'm cutting back on - but perhaps the most visible to people.

- KB

Off to another DC tomorrow morning, hoping to swap out some seriously old hardware ( ~ 7'ish years old ) with something slightly newer ( only 4 years old! )

There was a time when I spent lots of time in the Data Center. I didnt enjoy them very much then, too much noise, too many people telling me what to do and way too many unpaid overtime hours clocked up. The last of that was about 12 years ago. These days I goto the DC maybe three or four times in a year, and its mostly related to CentOS infrastructure or my own personal machines hosted around London. And unlike things 12 years ago, I quite enjoy my trips into the vault like colo rooms now.

Apart from a bunch of routine things that I need to sort out tomorrow, I'm hoping to bring online a hardware rng adapter, and a Tilera Server. If you havent seen this platform before, I recommend you do : specially if lots-of-cores is something you are keen on, or have a problem domain overlap with.

- KB

The CentOS.org infra is pretty well spread out, but we got caught out by the Sandy storm. Specially our mail and list services, which run from an Internap facility in New york.

Outage lasted from just after 03:00 hrs UTC October 30th 2012 to 07:12 hrs UTC October 30th 2012; and we dont seem to have lost any communcation. If you had bounce backs during that timeperiod, please do retry / resend the emails.

We dont have a machine that can be used as a hot-standby, but we do have fairly good backups. So should the machine go offline completely or suffer major damage, we would be able to bring services back on a different machine with no real loss of data.

- KB

Most people, me included, still consider IPv6 usage to be something not worth worrying about. This comes from the fact that most services are quite happy chugging along with just IPv4 access at both the service provider end and the service consumer end. However, what happens when an IPv6 option shows up ? Here are some numbers, many will find interesting, from the CentOS Mirrorlist service.


1st June 2012 : 0 hits on IPv6
11th June 2012 : We launched IPv6 access for mirrorlist.centos.org
+ 90 days ( midnight 13th Aug ):
--- 12,831,352 Hits to mirrorlist.centos.org were over ipv6
--- 711,014 unique IPv6's
--- with a usage average of 1.4 hits/sec
--- peak at 350 hits/sec

There are two, sometimes three, but always atleast two machines that respond to mirrorlist.centos.org requests over ipv6. Looking at the stats for one of these machines that has always been around, right since day one we get :

Total hits : 6,324,980
Of this 5,089,935 were CentOS-5 and 1,176,602 were CentOS-6 requests, the rest were invalid requests ( could be either CentOS-4 or for repos that dont exist )
Of the CentOS-5 hits, 61.24% of requests were to x86_64 repos
and from CentOS-6 hits, 27.05% of the reqests were to i386 repos



Interesting stuff, fairly large numbers.

Also worth noting here is that the numbers represent quite a skewed sample set, IPv6 is only really usable in some specific setups and in some specific environments / data centers. It does not represent an overall state of CentOS userbase, so please dont use these numbers to signify that.

- KB

Thats right, over the last 10 work days I've averaged about two and a half hours a day doing email. I've measured it.

Now, I am getting lots of stuff done - these emails are important and its been very productive overall. Quite a large part of what I am doing these days is building relationships and getting more people involved in specific communities. And doing some of this over email is handy : everyone has it, an audit trail and conversation tracking comes free, its available everywhere and best of all it accepted to be an async means of communication.

Is there a usable alternative to email here ? I looked and failed to find anything.

Worth keeping in mind that I say email to include personal emails as well as mailing lists. I didnt track it to that level of detail, but I'd guess about 70% of that time is spent on non mailing lists emails.

- KB

Hi,

Back home and online post linuxcon 2012; It was a truly amazing meetup and I got the chance to put faces to some of the people I've known from IRC for years! Plus there were some really great conversations with people about CentOS, what we do, how we do it and why we do what we do. I'll try and get some writeup's about some of these converstations online in the next few days ( and I also need to migrate the blog away to a better system, pointers and hints appreciated ).

In the mean time, its going to take me a couple of days to catchup on email and get back upto speed with whats going on in the community. If you are waiting for something from me, I'll be in touch shortly.

- KB

I've never listed my mobile number anywhere on the internet, and as far as I remember I've only ever shared it with friends and family. On the other hand, I've had the same number for years and its possible that its 'leaked'; But I still find it quite odd that people around the world manage to get their hands on the number, with no real effort. And that means I get calls.

Calls from people in Argentina at 4am UK time, wanting to know when php-5.4 is going to be released into CentOS-5. Calls from people in the UK, at 8am wanting to know if the httpd update released last night had a fix for CVE-XXX. Calls from people in India at 10pm UK time wanting to find out if the sound card on the motherboard they bought a few hours back, is supported on CentOS. A disgruntled passenger trying to check-in to their flight the next day, and the system throwing up a 'Apache on CentOS' page.

Some are a bit more alarming. eg. a call from people at a Large Defence Contractor in the USA asking who their 'CentOS Technical Account Manager' was and if I knew what the SLA terms were. Or the time when I got a call from a hosting company's Data Center saying there was a fire in the DC and they wanted to know if their CentOS backups were intact.

It's not something new, I've had these calls over the years from maybe 2008 or so. At one point, when it was really hectic with almost 10 to 12 calls a week, in 2010 I was seriously considering changing my number. Just doing the 'ignore if the number isnt in the address book' wasent scaling for me. But I didnt, the process of changing my number with everyone I knew was too much hassle, so I started giving people an alternative number and mostly started ignoring the 'popular' old mobile number. The number of such calls has now drastically reduced. I get maybe 1 or 2 in a week and in many cases I answer them and have had the odd interesting conversation. But realistacally, I think the time has come to change that number.

What I will, however, do is offer up a Voip line : +44-207-0999389 ; This terminates at a phone that I have on my desk. And I will try to make sure its turned on whenever I am doing CentOS stuff, or am in 'Open Source' mode. Go ahead, use that number - give me a call and if I am around, would love to have a chat. But please stop calling me on my mobile.

btw, I have tried to find my own number and failed to do so - even entering parts of the numbers into the various search engines does not bring up my mobile number. So, I have no idea where all these people suceed in finding it ?

- KB

If you are a web hosting company and deploying CentOS 5 or 6 images in a Cloud, I want to speak with you. Please get in touch via one of the mechanisms listed at : http://www.karan.org/contact.html

Alternatively, if you use services from a hosting company that uses CentOS images in a cloud : drop me a line and let me know about them, I will try and reach out directly.

Thanks in advance and look forward to getting in touch with some of you guys.

- KB

Looks like EL5.8 just got released upstream. Lots of sources just showed up on the ftp sites. Time to start up the CentOS-5 buildsystem.

I am often surprised by the sort of questions asked in the forums or on irc around open source projects - it just feels as if people are going out of their way to inflict pain and suffering upon themselves by trying to find the most awkward and most complicated way to do things. So how can we better help these people ? We dont need to save them or anything as drastic like that, its just a case of being able to show or explain that there might be a better way.

The first thing that I've started now doing, when asked a strange question is ask the person 'What are you really trying to achieve?'. You might be amazed how many times the answer has nothing to do with the question being asked. Try to establish what the end goal is, and in many cases its clear that the person has been lead astray by random posts on the internet, some of which are perfectly fine in their own context, but can be quite a kludge outside that context.

Establishing, clearly what the goal is before advice or opinion is thrown at people will always result in a better overall experience. And to the people spending their time in the irc channels, web forums and mailing lists helping others out : must respect. You guys are the ones making the idea of Communities and Open Source work.

- KB

Looks like I will need to get a Visa again to visit Belgium for Fosdem 2012. This is starting to get a bit irritating now, six times I've been to Fosdem and every time they have asked me to come in for an interview before they give me a visa; once again ? Surely by now it should be possible to get onto the visa-by-post process.

- KB

So HP is getting in on the high density compute node game. And looking at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hp_redstone_calxeda_servers/ they are doing it with a twist : use ARM chips. That being beside the point, I think these would make for fantastic machines where individual thread performance isnt that much of a deal, but being able to get lots of threads going is. PostGres-XC as an example. Rails apps are another great example where a cluster-in-a-box can be an attractive option.

Might be worth noting that while its getting most of its attention based on the ARM buzzword, they seem to be saying that Intel as well as AMD cpus might make it into these machines as well. So while OS options might be somewhat limited at the moment, that problem should solve itself fairly easily.

On the other hand, getting 128 cores into a 2U AMD machine these days isnt that hard - its a slightly different set of mechanics to this cluster-in-a-box solution, but in many cases solves similar problems - and you get the advantage of a single hyper visor, should one need it. Then there are also near-commodity like specialist kit which goto 512 Cores in a 2U machine ( x86 example: http://www.qsscit.com/en/01_product/02_detail.php?mid=27&sid=95&id=135&qs=56 )

I've now had the SSD in my laptop for about 10 days. Its made a massive difference to the way I work.

Its striking as to how much of a difference having this extra performance in the laptop would make. In march I upgraded the memory on this laptop from 2GB to 8GB - which also made a massive difference, specially since I almost never reboot the device and the filesystem cache get very good at handling just the right kind of stuff - but what kills them is my email ( ~ 30 gb ) and VMs ( upto 5 running at any given time ). Having the SSD now means that I no longer need to drop back to 10 seconds for jedit startup after I've been running a couple of VMs.

One thing that hasn't gone quite to expectation is the battery life. The HP 2540p had ~ 4 hrs or so, doing what I do, when I got it new. That had dropped to just over 3 hrs with the 250gb sata disk in. With the SSD its now gone to 2 hrs ~30 min or so. Initially that felt quite strange, I was expecting it to go in the other direction. And while I havent been able to put a finger on exactly what this is, it seems like there are 2 interesting side effects from the SSD upgrade.

1) The four cores on this i5 laptop now run at full speed ( 2.53 Ghz ) a lot more often than they did in the past, trending this over the last 48 hrs and its averaged 1.87Ghz; Not sure what it was earlier but the cpu governors used to stay blue a lot more than they do now.

2) Heat. The cooling fan is on a lot more, and the heat vent seems a lot warmer than it ever did in the past. This might be due to the cpus running a lot faster, a lot more. The disk itself does not 'seem' to be any warmer. The bottom left side of the laptop which houses the disk feels cool.

The big win of-course, is performance of everything. Almost every app just starts in place ( even eclipse! ). Doing a search in large code projects is instantaneous. Git operations are visibly quicker. Even using svn isn't nearly as boring as it used to be, if I can stop adding -a to all my svn commits it would not get in my way.

The only thing that isn't quite as quick as it needs to be on this machine now is the graphics interface ( intel HD ).

Also worth keeping in mind is that use CentOS-6 for the SSD hosted content, and make sure you have 'discard' enabled as a mount option.

- KB

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-6.0 for 
i386 and x86_64 Architectures.

CentOS-6.0 is based on the upstream release EL 6.0 and includes packages 
from all variants. All upstream repositories have been combined into 
one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

There are some important changes to this release compared with the 
previous versions of CentOS and we highly recommend reading this 
announcement along with the Release Notes at 
http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS6.0

There are no CD images being released with CentOS-6, however we have 
some CD variants in the pipeline. Details for these are mentioned below.

Since upstream has a 6.1 version already released, we will be using a 
Continous Release repository for 6.0 to bring all 6.1 and post 6.1 
security updates to all 6.0 users, till such time as CentOS-6.1 is 
released itself. There will be more details about this posted within the 
next 48 hours.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Upgrading from CentOS-4 or CentOS-5:

We recommend everyone run through a reinstall rather than attempt an 
inplace upgrade from CentOS-4 or CentOS-5

+++++++++++++++++++++++
LiveCD and LiveDVD

LiveCDs and LiveDVDs for i386 and x86_64 will be released within the 
next few days. These will bring in the ability to directly install from 
the livemedia.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Minimal Install CD

We have also created a minimal install CD, that would bring up a base 
machine with just enough content to have a usable platform. This CD 
image will be released in the next few days.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
The LightWeightServer (LWS) CD

In order to bring back the CentOS-4 Server CD style single iso image, we 
are creating a LWS varient of the main distro. Details for this will be 
posted in the next few days with release happening after the live media 
and the minimal cd editions.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Downloading CentOS-6.0 for new installs:

When possible, consider using torrents to run the downloads. In most 
cases you will find its also the fastest means to download the distro. 
There are currently over a thousand  people seeding CentOS-6 and it's 
possible to get upto 100mbps downloads via these torrents.

Torrent files for the DVD's are avilable at :
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/isos/i386/CentOS-6.0-i386-bin-DVD.torrent
http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.0/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD.torrent

You can also use a mirror close to you :
http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=30

Most mirrors will allow direct DVD downloads over http, ftp and rsync.

Please keep in mind that not all mirrors are currently updated, some 
might take upto another 24 hours before they have all the content.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
sha1sum for the CentOS-6.0 ISOS:

i386:
fcf49e875cd4494f2af68cf257ab9e93523c9427  CentOS-6.0-i386-bin-DVD.iso
862815623d2e7990207dd78a281837c7eb719e83  CentOS-6.0-i386-netinstall.iso

x86_64:
9de87b0c696ebd72b952edb4cc06c24cbdc37d81  CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso
5e3834621f11fbcca78cf7d70625c647045f45f5  CentOS-6.0-x86_64-bin-DVD2.iso
23f9e606cbcbd52d2e5df3716a85cdde336f7bfe  CentOS-6.0-x86_64-netinstall.iso

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Sources and Debuginfo packages:

SRPMS and debuginfo packages are still making their way to the CentOS 
mirrors and should be available within the next 24 to 48 hours. We are 
prioritising the centos modified packages.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Getting Help:

The best place to start when looking for help with CentOS is at the wiki 
( http://wiki.centos.org/GettingHelp ) which lists various options and 
communities who might be able to help. If you think there is a bug in 
the system, do report it at http://bugs.centos.org/ - but keep in mind 
that the bugs system is *not* a support mechanism.

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Contributing and joining the project:

We are always looking for people to join and help with various things in 
the project. If you are keen to help out a good place to start is the 
wiki page at http://wiki.centos.org/Contribute . If you have questions 
or a specific area you would like to contribute towards that is not 
covered on that page, feel free to drop in on 
#centos-devel at irc.freenode.net for a chat or email the centos-devel list 
(http://lists.centos.org).

+++++++++++++++++++++++
Thanks to everyone who contributed towards making 6.0


Enjoy!

Earlier in the day today Red Hat released RHEL 6.1 ( http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2011/Red-Hat-Delivers-Red-Hat-Enterprise-Linux-6-1 ). Congratulations to them, it looks like a great release with lots of cool new stuff in there.

Most people will want to know how this impacts CentOS and the CentOS-6 plans. We are, at this time, on course to deliver CentOS-6 within the next couple of weeks. We will carry on with those plans as is, and deliver a 6.0 release and then goto work on 6.1. I am fairly confident that we can get to a 6.1 release within a few weeks of the 6.0 set being finalised. Partially due to the automation and the testing process's being put into place to handle the entire CentOS-6 branch.

If you would like to follow progress of the QA and Release team, you are welcome to drop in at http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/ . Jeff has been keeping the calendar as updated as possible and is doing a good job of keeping a fair bit of information flowing through there. At some point next week, we will try and get some dates in place for the 6.1 process as well.

So what happens if 5.7 comes along in the mean time ? Well, the CentOS-5 process is now completely disconnected from the CentOS-6 one, and a 5.7 release should have no impact on the progress of CentOS-6 and the release cycles. We have also been working on plans for an opt-in, by design process that would allow users to get early access to packages being built for a point release. More details on that soon.

Comments and feedback are always welcome!

- KB