time: 00:07.37
February 26th, 2010 Ante Karamatić
Pacemaker/Corosync/OpenAIS/OCFS2/GFS2 for Ubuntu 10.04
February 10th, 2010 Ante KaramatićCouple of days/weeks ago I’ve issued call for testing of new cluster stack for Ubuntu 10.04. At that time, most of the stack was finished, but we lacked proper support for clustered file system. Now, I’ve modified ocfs2-tools package so that it compiles with support for libdlm (provided by redhat-cluster) and pacemaker. I’ve also modified redhat-cluster package so that it builds with support for pacemaker.
As a result, there is now a new test case which needs testing - cluster with drbd for underlying device and ocfs2 as a filesystem. So, please visit - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClusterStack/LucidTesting#Pacemaker, drbd8 and OCFS2 and give it a go.
After completing this milestone, only thing left for proper cluster stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is submitting MIRs (Main Inclusion Requests) for packages that are still in universe and demoting cman (and others) to universe.
For those that would like to test their own setups and are familiar with corosync/pacemaker/drbd8/ocfs2, ubuntu-ha’s PPA is located here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-ha/+archive/lucid-cluster/.
UPDATE: We now support both OCFS2 and GFS2! How to: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClusterStack/LucidTesting#Pacemaker, drbd8 and OCFS2 or GFS2
Is this for real?
January 12th, 2010 Ante KaramatićWhen I was in high school, during IT classes we worked with DOS, WordPerfect for DOS and BASIC. When my sister showed me her school textbook ‘Information technologies for gymnasium’, I was expecting tons of Windows screenshots. But, I was surprised. Look at those:
Wow! Not only there are Ubuntu screenshots and big Wilber, no… The textbook explains what is Open Source, what are proprietary operating systems. You can even find words like FreeBSD, NetBSD, EXT2, EXT3, UFS :) They equally provide space for Microsoft Windows Vista, XP and Ubuntu Linux (no MacOSX). Granted, in the office section, they explain how to work with MS Office tools, but they acknowledge existence of OpenOffice.org, quoting ‘We were attracted by Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org.’, providing links to OpenOffice.org (on each chapter about office tools) and manuals.
And that big Wilber isn’t just to fill in space - they actually have 10 pages long ‘manual’ on how to use basic GiMP tools! There’s no Photoshop section in the book. Only GiMP for bitmap editing - and it’s even provided on the DVD shipped with the book.
Gvozadnović, Ikica, Kos, Miljaš, Srnec, Sekulić-Štivčević, Zvonarek (authors of the textbook) - you really surprised me and kudos for this great textbook. If you can read Croatian, take a look at http://www.propyx.com/udzbenik/izbornik.
Call for testing: Cluster components of Ubuntu 10.04
January 11th, 2010 Ante KaramatićThere was a discussion, at the last UDS, about cluster stack in Ubuntu 10.04 and later. Blueprint is located here. According to that spec, I’ve created packages for cluster-glue, cluster-agents, heartbeat, corosync, openais, pacemaker, keepalived, drbd and redhat-cluster.
Some of these packages are based on stuff Martin Loschwitz did and some are merged from Debian. Most of them have serious changes in packaging, but all of them are latest upstream version (except keepalived).
Now that those are packaged, we need help with testing. So, please, help us test those components. Choose redhat-cluster or pacemaker as a cluster stack. Combine with DRBD, KVM or Xen and try to break them. In a day or two, I’ll set up a wiki page with configuration instructions for these tools, so anybody could test it. Input from upstream is also welcome.
Packages are located at ubuntu-ha PPA: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-ha/+archive/ppa/+packages
Packages are created only for 10.04, Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
UTF8 collation support for Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian (latin) in MariaDB/MySQL
November 29th, 2009 Ante KaramatićThere has been a long lasting problem of collation in MySQL for Croatian language - it was impossible. When, at that time, Yugoslavian keyboard layout was invented, it was designed to cover all the languages from all republics. It covered all Slovenian characters (plus couple of characters that they don’t have), but not all Croatian (it missed ‘nj’, ‘lj’ and ‘dž’). When Yugoslavia fall apart, all the republics just took already wide spread Yugoslav layout. For Slovenian layout, that was great, with exception of including characters they didn’t have. For Croatian and Serbian latin, well, not that great…
You see, now we type letter ‘nj’ as a combination of ‘n’ and ‘j’. Same thing with ‘lj’ and ‘dž’. That wouldn’t be that bad if every word, containing ‘l’ or ‘n’ and ‘j’ together would be pronounced as ‘lj’ or ‘nj’. For example, we have two words that we write the same (injekcija), but pronounce different. In one case with say it with ‘nj’, and in the other as ‘n’ and ‘j’. Talking about the bad choice of deciding to use ‘nj’ as a character for that letter. There are also examples of ‘dž’.
As you can see, until we put ‘lj’ and ‘nj’ characters on the keyboard, we will never have correct sorting in any database. Good news is that those characters exists in Unicode and that’s why we have ‘hr unicode’ layout in Xorg. Too bad nobody uses it.
Until that’s sorted out, I’m happy to announce that MariaDB/MySQL just accepted a patch that makes possible contracting non-ascii characters, meaning that we can now have sorting rules for ‘dž’ (more about that at http://www.collation-charts.org/articles/croatian.htm). As a result, utf8_croatian_ci and ucs2_croatian_ci collations were created and added to MariaDB 5.1 and MySQL 5.6. Since Alexander Barkov was so kind and provided a patch for MySQL 5.1, I’ve created packages for Ubuntu. I’ve also modified that patch so that it works with MySQL 5.0. If you need this feature, go add my PPA to your sources.list:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~ivoks/+archive/mysql-hr/
It’s important to realize that this patch contains very intrusive change in collation mechanism, so it’s not just a patch for Croatian collation. People from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Monte Negro and Serbia (latin) can also use this collation for their languages. It does not cover all problems (’injekcija’ and ‘injekcija’ for example), but at least words starting with dž won’t be at the end of the sort :)
Big thanks to MariaDB community!
10 seconds boot is already here!
June 3rd, 2009 Ante KaramatićHardware: Lenovo X200s with Mushkin Europe 2 120GB SSD instead of default Seagate 5000rpm disk. Boot to fully functional (default) Jaunty desktop from cold start (powered off) is less than 30 seconds. If BIOS, grub and kernel/initrd loading are excluded, boot time is less than 10 seconds.
Video:
http://www.init.hr/dev/fast-boot.mp4
Except the automatic login in gdm there were *no* other changes in Ubuntu.
UDS so far…
May 27th, 2009 Ante KaramatićThere were lots of great sessions so far. Much more than on previous UDS and I think this approach of multiple sessions from same track is actually working quite well. There’s also a bit ‘human’ feeling cause we don’t have all the guards watching our every move, as we had at Mountain View. Bottom line, I really like it. Hopefully, there’ll be even more results after it, than it was after previous ones.
But, the best move Canonical did this time was bringing design team. It’s very important to actually be able to get into contact with people that do design for a living. That way they can see our usability problems and we can get advice how to solve them. Having design teams as part of community is major step for open source. After all, we all have the same goal.
Congratulations everyone!
April 23rd, 2009 Ante Karamatić
Looking forward
April 17th, 2009 Ante KaramatićStep by step, with 9.04 Ubuntu conquered another peek. It finally went up into the clouds. We could stop here and enjoy our glory, but there are higher peeks to conquer. Achieving higher goals is harder, more dangerous, but also provides more glory, and what’s more important, it gives us more satisfaction.
If we are going to tackle higher goals, we’ll need you and your ideas. Only together we can go even higher. So, visit http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/server/ and give us some ideas, let’s push 9.10 above the clouds!
Let’s clear some FUD :)
April 14th, 2009 Ante KaramatićRonald McCarty wrote an article ‘Your Distro is Insecure: Ubuntu’.
This is an answer to some of claims he stated.
Ronald starts with some valid points about default directory permissions. Right, we choosed 0755. There are valid use cases for 0700 and 0755. It’s impossible to set up a fit-for-all solution.
Next claim is that Ubuntu supports IMAP2 and POP2. Too bad Ronald can’t read netstat’s output correctly. Ubuntu (it’s actually dovecot we talking about here) doesn’t support POP2 and IMAP2. What Ubuntu/deovecot supports are IMAP4rev1 and POP3.
Before making this claims, author should know that IMAP4 is an extension of IMAP2, so it uses the same port as imap2. As you can’t define multiple names to one port in /etc/services, sane practice is to put imap2 there. netstat reads /etc/services and then claims that protocol is imap2.
Following this is claim that Ubuntu opens bootpc and bootps UDP ports when there’s a static network configuration. bootpc is clear sign that you have a running dhclient, Ronald. If you configured your network to a static IP during installation, you won’t have dhclient running. bootps, on the other hand, is a clear sign someone is running dhcp server.
So, while there are some valid points in that article, author should know better before writing articles like this one.