Ubuntu Server Team Blog
 
Bits and pieces from the Ubuntu Server Team
Updated: 28 weeks 6 days ago
Wed, 2010-02-17 09:25
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting (jib)
- ACTION: ttx to announce papercuts nominations
- ACTION: zul to do another call to action for the apport hooks involvement
- ACTION: zul to raise php5.3 update on -server and -devel mailinglist, outline which apps are currently not working with 5.3
Alpha3 progress review (ttx)
- Make sure status is updated on each of your blueprint whiteboards EOD on Tuesdays !
-
Prio 1 specs < 70% completed: uec-testing, mysql-5.0, seeds
- uec-testing (mathiaz)
- kirkland: testing iso’s today
- mathiaz: good shape
- mysql-5.0 (zul)
- [ACTION] zul to forward issues about ctbd to jelmer to see if those can be lifted before FF
- [ACTION] zul to do another call to action for the apport hooks involvement
- Discussion on RHCS, whether to keep in main, move to universe; mailing list thread should reach a conclusion soon
- daily-vcs (zul)
- zul: been working on higher priority specs
- puppet-etckeeper-integration (mathiaz, soren)
- soren, mathiaz: should merge from debian unstable, not in danger
-
Prio 2 specs < 50% completed: daily-vcs, puppet-etckeeper-integration, puppet-uec-ec2-integration
server-lucid-papercuts (ttx)
server-lucid-papercuts
server-lucid-apport-hooks update (zul)
server-lucid-apport-hooks
Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (soren)
- smoser: new guy starts: 15th (which is a US holiday) so 16th
- soren: handed over automatic ISO testing stuff to the QA team. It’ll be running in the DC soon.
Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (jjohansen)
- jjohansen: new EC2 kernel is checked in, has the latest updates, and updated configs
Weekly SRU review (mathiaz)
Open Discussion
- kirkland: tftpd-hpa in lucid sucks
- stgraber: I’m still not sure about what to do here but I’m very tempted to restore the old behavior
- ttx: Ubuntu bug 508382 in bacula “bconsole does not connect to bacula-director” [Medium,Confirmed]
Agree on next meeting date and time
- ttx: That will be again same place same time, for at least one more week
Tue, 2010-01-26 18:55
Last week the Lucid Alpha3 development phase started. So in following our Alpha2 announcement below is what’s on the horizon for Alpha3. Some of these are new blueprints for Alpha3 some are continued work from Alpha2.
Alpha3 Projects
Since the upcoming release is an LTS, a lot of this cycles work is centered around stability. Currently, we’re broadly targeting the following 3 areas:
Software integration
Improving our UEC & EC2 experience
QA & testing
There are also a few community driven specs which are targeted for the Lucid release:
The full list of blueprints related to these targets and our progress can be found on the server team wiki or on our work item tracker.
Feedback & Involvement
If you have any suggestions for AWS libraries in PHP/Perl/Python or are interested in packaging/contributing a library in another language, please let us know in the RFC thread
To make the most of our Server Papercuts project, please participate in the email discussion and nominate papercuts and/or volunteer to fix them!
To help us track down bugs and crashes better, we’re adding apport hooks to several key pieces of software. If you’d like to implement any of those hooks or contribute your own, please let us know in
the blueprint.
The Ubuntu Cluster Stack spec has issued a call for testing and would love to hear about your experiences.
Wed, 2010-01-20 18:49
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting
- smoser to look at getting Karmic images refreshed: bug verifiedfixed, image refresh coming up before end of week
Action: smoser to publish karmic cloud image refresh
Spec quickreview
All alpha-3 targeted specs are on track.
To avoid useless noise, blueprint assignees are asked to refresh the status of their specs by using the “Status:” section of the blueprint whiteboard. It will then automagically show up in the report (http://people.canonical.com/~pitti/workitems/canonical-server-lucid-alpha-3.html).
Action: Everyone: update status for your specs before the meeting starts
Alpha3 subcycle planning
The final planning is still being discussed, and should be officialized this week. No change is expected in the Prio 1 specs (“High” priority), some priority changes might affect Prio2/3 specs, and some late specs might be introduced as Prio2/3 specs.
server-lucid-papercuts
We discussed the papercuts acceptance criteria, as described in a recent ubuntu-server ML post. This looks fine and was approved. Final criteria should make clear that any server-related package (in main, universe or multiverse) is relevant, and that the fix should not introduce a new feature (and therefore be OK to fix after FeatureFreeze). The criteria might be further refined when we start hitting difficult nominations.
About the project publicity plan, mathiaz already posted a blog entry about the project on the ubuntuserver blog. This should be complemented by an ubuntu-devel ML post, personal blog posts (ttx, zul) and brought to the attention of the Ubuntu Weekly News team. alexm will talk about it in his loco. The message is about nominating your favorite server papercuts, so that we gather as many candidates as possible now.
Action: ttx, zul to blog about papercuts, make sure UWN gets the word
Action: ttx to send email about criteria and nomination to ubuntu-devel, ubuntu-server
server-lucid-apport-hooks
Building on the UDS Dallas discussion about how having apport hooks in server packages can help the quality of the bug reports we receive, the server apport hooks effort aims at adding as many as we can before FeatureFreeze. zul created a page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/ApportHooks with likely candidates. Anyone interested, please sign up for your favorite package, or add your own !
Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team
soren has been extending the ISO testing features, and can now at the click of a button run ISO tests of the cartesian product of i386/amd64,lvm/non-lvm,basic/mail/bind9/lamp/postgresql installs. Documentation on the setup is under way, and the process should be ultimately integrated with Marc Tardif’s checkbox work. soren will lead an UbuntuDeveloperWeek session about this next Tuesday at 2000 UTC.
Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team
Discussion concentrated on bug 494565, since a decision must be reached on the best option to follow. The -virtual kernel currently being a subflavour of -server and -generic-pae, building support for the block devices needed for EC2 and UEC would also affect those kernels. The options are CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_2, CONFIG_VIRTIO_NET and CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK. CONFIG_SCSI_SYM53C8XX_2=y, in particular, could have unexpected consequences on some rare hardware. Note that building in that SCSI support would not prevent it from being manually bypassed. Alternatives would be to make -virtual a flavour of its own (but this adds a lot of maintenance work for the kernel team), patch UEC so that it works without that SCSI support (potential performance issues, deviation from upstream), or abandon the idea of using no ramdisks for UEC. This should be further discussed on ubuntu-devel.
Action: smoser to raise thread about the no-ramdisk / -virtual config tradeoff
Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs
List at http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/team-assigned/canonical-server-assigned-bug-tasks.html still needs to be cleaned up to be more useful.
Action: zul, kirkland to unassign themselves from “maybe working on one day” bugs
Agree on next meeting date and time
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, January 27th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Wed, 2010-01-20 13:46
At UDS Lucid in Dallas the Ubuntu Server team had a session on how to take the opportunity of the LTS release to concentrate on fixing highly-annoying, low-hanging fruit bugs. This effort lead by Thierry Carrez was named Server papercuts as a tribute to the famous One hundred papercuts project from the Desktop experience team.
The idea is to spend time during this less-featureful development cycle to fix server usability issues to make Ubuntu Server even more sysadmin-friendly. The first part of this work involves identifying such issues, and for that we need the help of the Ubuntu Server user community, which experiences those issues every day. The second part is about fixing these Server papercuts. This is a great way to start being involved in bug fixing and Ubuntu development since these low hanging fruit should all be relatively easy-to-fix bugs.
How can I help?
If you come a across a bug in a server related package that looks like a good candidate, open a task against the server papercut project. The Ubuntu Server team will then review the different nomination and accept bugs that can be considered as low-hanging fruits.
If you have a patch to fix a bug, grab it and attach it to the bug. Or better, prepare a bzr branch and submit a merge proposal: the Ubuntu Server team will review it and guide you in the process of making your fix available in the archive.
Mon, 2010-01-18 08:05
The big number of Ubuntu bugs can sometimes be overwhelming. Providing high quality bugs can help in getting the bugs triaged and fixed faster. This is where Apport comes into the game – a tool used to automatically generate crash reports for debugging. Apport can be extended via hooks to provide specific information on a per package basis. For example the Ubuntu Server team added hooks for MySQL during the Karmic release cycle. Relevant logs as well as configuration information are automatically added to every bug reported against the mysql package.
If you have ideas about adding apport hooks for other server related packages let the Ubuntu Server team know. Add it to the wiki page, look up how to write apport hooks and prepare a patch – or better a bzr branch. The Ubuntu Server team will review it and help you integrate your work into the archive.
Thu, 2010-01-14 13:24
The Ubuntu Server team is looking for feedback on which AWS client libraries should be made available as part of Ubuntu. Making it easy to develop applications that use AWS and UEC services is one of the goal of the Ubuntu Server team. The AWS client libraries blueprint focuses on listing existing projects and then choose which ones should be packaged for Lucid.
If you know of great projects in PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java (or any other platform) that help using AWS and UEC services such as EC2 or S3 make a note of them in the wiki page (preferred choice) or by leaving a comment below.
Wed, 2010-01-13 17:45
While preparing for the second milestone on the road the Lucid Lynx release, the Ubuntu Server team is looking for help in testing the Ubuntu Server isos and EC2/UEC images. If you have some spare server hardware and have some time to dive into a RAID or LVM installation, head to the ISO QA tracker and pick one of the remaining ISO test cases.
If you’re more interested in the Cloud, either on EC2 or UEC, Lucid alpha2 candidates are available for testing as well. Bundle, run, test one of the image – and don’t forget to report your results to the ISO QA Tracker.
Wed, 2009-12-23 20:45
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting
Most of the assignee were not attending the meeting.
ACTION: jib to talk to robbiew about ecryptfs in ubuntu
Check blueprint status and progress for the week
- server-lucid-eucalyptus-karmic-retrospective: on track
- server-lucid-eucalyptus-merging-and-packaging: on track
- server-lucid-seeds: on track
- mathiaz is preparing the final list of packages and will ask for feedback on the remaining items.
- server-lucid-euca-remote-autoregister: 50% done, slightly slowed down by 1.6.2 integration work, on track
- server-lucid-uec-testing: on track, even though the completion rate is low.
Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (jjohansen)
ttx brought bug 499785 – nic-usb-modules should include asix to the attention of the kernel team as it is needed to help test UEC in laptops environments.
mathiaz mentioned he had asked the kernel team for feedback on dropping the kernel-package package to universe.
Blueprints for post alpha2
Once alpha2 is out, the server team will look at the next set of blueprints to be implemented. Some of them still need more discussion which will happen during the next meeting on January 6th.
The following blueprints will be reviewed:
Agree on next meeting date and time
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, January 6th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Wed, 2009-12-09 17:57
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Scribe assignment
In an effort to share the burden, the responsibility and the community visibility, the meeting minutes scribe role will rotate alphabetically every week between the server team engineers. ttx will write up the current minutes, and zul will write the ones for next week. The process to follow is detailed in the Server team knowledge base. mathiaz can give access to the ubuntuserver blog to those missing it.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting
- jos to find out the best time for the meeting: Server meeting time to stay the same for at least the next month or two
Check blueprint status and progress for the week
Everything is green so far. The Alpha2 burn down chart is positive. ScottK mentioned that his mail integration spec still needs approval.
ACTION: jos to review/approve server-lucid-more-mail-integration
Alpha1 ISO testing
Lucid Alpha 1 candidates are now up on the ISO tracker. Everyone is encouraged to participate in testing them ! Cloud images should be up soon as well.
ACTION: smoser to push cloud dailies to ISO tracker asap
Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs
Nothing assigned to team needing re-assignment. Some team members are still assigned to more bugs than they should be actively working on, so this might need more review. No red flag raised.
Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team
KSM has been turned on and should land in post-Alpha1 kernels. It requires user space to use the madise system call to mark pages for sharing. That’s expected to be part of soon-released qemu-kvm 0.12. jjohansen still has to go through and update the EC2 configs to be more like virtual. On the table is also ramdisk-less images, -virtual kernels with all reasonable disk drivers for root devices as built-in, and Hz. This will be tracked in a bug that smoser will open.
ACTION: smoser to open bug for kernel team follow-up
Development sponsorship
Every server engineer with sponsorship capabilities is expected to spend one hour a week sponsoring stuff. The easiest way to track that is to do it every week at a fixed time, and combine it with Code reviews.
ACTION: zul, kirkland, mathiaz to sign up for sponsoring time on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/CodeReviews
Developer communication
Developer communication rules have been recently updated, please have a look at them and do the right thing.
soren’s QA project for Alpha2
Until Alpha-2, soren will be in the QA team, rather than the server team, working on automating a lot of the testing we are doing for servers. So far he has enabled a few test suites in package builds and set up kvm-autotest to do scripted, interactive testing.
Open Discussion
Instead of rewriting all Ubuntu Server python code in Perl, we plan to rewrite Jos in Python. Daviey encourages everyone to submit their Ubuntu Server tips to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/server-tips.
Agree on next meeting date and time
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, December 16th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Mon, 2009-12-07 13:00
The Ubuntu Server team would like to get your feedback on whether the packages listed below should be demoted to universe or promoted to main.
Since Lucid is an LTS release the Ubuntu Server team conducted a critical review of the current contents of the server related seeds in order to free some space on the -server CD and to reduce the number of packages we’ll be maintaining for 5 years. Some packages are not necessary, might be abandoned and thus should be demoted to universe. Some packages are brought up in main by recommends while they should just be suggested. Some very useful packages are missing and should be promoted to main.
The list of packages considered is tracked in a wiki page and included below. You can either edit the wiki page with your comments or reply to this thread.
Proposed universe demotions
- nis
- elinks
- lm-sensors
- sensord
- cricket
- radvd
- logwatch: logcheck provides the same functionality
- vlock
- lilo
- libxp6
- redhat-cluster-suite: not properly maintained
- virt-manager
- backuppc: bacula is the backup solution in main
- racoon
- ipsec-tools
- siege
- minicom: cu is tiny and trivial to support, but doesn’t support error correction
- openssh-blacklist, openssl-blacklist: needs further consideration by cjwatson
- analog: awstats is also in main – upstream much more active.
- nut-hal-drivers: see Halsectomy
Proposed main promotions
- oidentd
- tdb-tools: for samba cluster
- ctdb: for samba cluster
- acl
- nginx: 6.21 percent market share according to Netcraft
- kernel-package: remove from -server iso
Proposed Recommends downgrades
- kernel-package: remove from -server iso (stays in main thanks to platform.lucid/supported-development).
Fri, 2009-12-04 01:09
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION from previous meeting
ACTION: ttx to review status of bugs the following bugs for any missing info
- 455625: lacking some reproduction, the Eucalyptus team marked it invalid
- 460085: missing some feedback from the Eucalyptus team, basically the results of their long-standing rampart tests
- 461156: fixed in Lucid, SRU pending
ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication
Check blueprint status and progress for the week (jib)
- Feature Definition Freeze is this week.
- Non Alpha2, but ready for review:
- other-cloud-providers
- vmbuilder-multiple-outputs
- To track progress during Alpha2, we will:
Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/team-assigned/canonical-server-assigned-bug-tasks.html (jib)
Weekly SRU review (mathiaz)
2009 Server Survey announce: http://nicolas.barcet.com/drupal/en/2009-server-survey-announce
Nick Barcet announced the 2009 Server Survey. To improve exposure, any of you that can republish the announce on a loco planet or some other means do relay the info in the next couple weeks. So far, the plan is to keep the survey up at least until mid-january. Nick will shortly send an email to the server ML with the same information.
Open discussion
Agree on next meeting date and time
Tue, 2009-12-01 18:13
Now that UDS has ended one of the tasks Ubuntu developers focus on is merging packages from Debian. As Lucid will be an LTS release, packages from testing (instead of unstable) will be pulled in. Here is a selection of packages from the Ubuntu Server team that look easy to get you started on merges:
Some merges may already have been done. Other may turn out to be sync requests. And if you run out of packages to merge you can just head over to Merge-O-Matic to get the full list of packages waiting for your merging skills!
Thu, 2009-11-26 05:41
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION from previous meeting
ACTION: ttx to review status of bugs 455625, 460085 and 461156 for any missing info ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication
Check blueprint status and progress for the week (mdz)
mdz reminded that the list of blueprints is used to track plans for Lucid. The focus is now on drafting the specifications after last week discussions at UDS. Work items should also be added to the blueprint whiteboard so that a burn down chart can be generated during the cycle. Once the wiki page is written and the work items have been defined the status of the blueprint should be set to Review.
All of the blueprints should be ready for review first thing Monday morning.
Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/team-assigned/canonical-server-assigned-bug-tasks.html (mdz)
Nothing was assigned to the team. Most of the bugs seemed to be SRU-related.
Work items tracking (mdz)
mathiaz asked how to handle work items that can’t be defined up-front as they depends on completion of existing work items. mdz suggested to create work items for each of the proposed changes. If some of them can be skipped, it’s easy to skip them later, but we don’t want to forget any. The most important thing is that the list is at approximately the right level of granularity, so that we make steady progress through the list. Work items need to fit into a 1-2 day chunk of work.
Weekly SRU review (mathiaz)
Only the hardy nomination list had one bug to be reviewed. The last two weeks of fixed bugs have also been reviewed for potential SRUs.
Spamassassin update
ScottK asked about the status of Spamassassin in Lucid. mathiaz replied that Daviey had been investigating the situation with upstream. He also suggested to define work items in the associated blueprint even if the drafter doesn’t plan to do the work. Documenting what needs to be done may help in getting things moved forward by other people.
Agree on next meeting date and time
kirkland to discuss a new time slot with maria.
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, December 2nd at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Wed, 2009-11-11 18:32
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting
ACTION: nurmi to help investigate/validate/fix bugs 455625, 460085 and 461156
UDS: server track planning
mdz will schedule the server track before the end of the week. To make sure he doesn’t miss your blueprint, please name it server-lucid-* and set him as approver. There can be two parallel sessions in the server track (as with other tracks), so you should subscribe to the blueprints you are interested in to try to avoid scheduling conflicts.
Merging, merging, merging
Lucid is open for merging, which is a great way to learn packaging for starters. Since compiling a list of easy merges seemed to help last time, mathiaz will compile it again this time and blog about it.
ACTION: mathiaz to compile a list of easy merges for publication
Open Discussion
nijaba mentioned bug 450044, which allowed to spot that ubuntu-server was not a bug contact for euca2ools (now fixed). Most of the crew is expected to enjoy the great(?) texan winter in Dallas next week.
Agree on next meeting date and time
Next week is UDS Lucid, so next meeting will be on Wednesday, November 25th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
Fri, 2009-11-06 05:15
Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.
Review ACTION points from previous meeting
ACTION: kirkland to add a recipe covering virsh to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/VirtManager
- nurmi to investigate bug 455625
ACTION: nurmi to investigate bug 455625
UDS Lucid preparation
ttx created a wiki page for 10.04 input from server team. mathiaz reminded that there will two tracks dedicated to the Server team like the last UDS.
Assigned and to-be-assigned bugs
A discussion about adding python-software-properties to ubuntu-standard took place. soren noted that if the request was to add the package to the default server install adding it to ubuntu-standard may not be the best place. zul will look into that with the Fondation team.
ScottK mentioned that it looked like courier was pretty badly broken at the moment and in need of at least a serious triage effort.
Eucalyptus Karmic SRU
mathiaz announced that a first round of bug fixes for UEC in Karmic had been prepared. Packages are being uploaded to -proposed. Help in testing them will be welcome once they’re accepted by the SRU team.
Daily EC2 images
smoser reminded that ‘daily’ images of karmic for EC2 are now automatically published twice weekly. Image removal is now covered by the new policy In short, 5 builds of each release/arch are kept in ‘testing’ (daily builds). When a build ‘falls off’, it is made private for 30 days before deletion. This policy covers kernels and ramdisks in ‘-testing’ also. The code is available in LP – feedback is welcome!
spamassassin review
ScottK pointed to the state of spamassassin in Lucid: the upstream project hasn’t done a new release in over a year. Questions about its fate (leave it stale, switch to svn snapshot, other solution) should be discussed during UDS.
ACTION: Daviey to investigate spamassassin status in lucid
Agree on next meeting date and time
ACTION: mathiaz to update the fridge
Next meeting will be on Wednesday, November 11th at 14:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.
|
|
|
|
