Flock 2018: Day 2

by on 2018/08/14 at 12:08 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

Day two started out with The power of one: For the good of the community by Rebecca Fernandez. She had a lot of great information there on how to handle various community interaction and we had a number of questions from the audience. Some of the things were how to approach busy folks with your ideas, or how to suggest things in communities you are new to as well as how to handle ‘heated’ issues on mailing lists. A number of great points to ponder there.

Next up was my talk about keeping rawhide on the trail. I had added a few points to my slides early in the morning before coffee and that bit me at the end of the talk (my summary/questions slides got deleted somehow). Other than that I hope it went well. I talked about history and then a bunch of interesting compose issues we hit in the last while and then some things we could try and do to make it better.

Next I wanted to go to Brian Stinsons CI talk, but it was already standing room only by the time I got my laptop all packed up from my talk. So, I did a bit more hallway track.

I had to go to Christoph Wickerts talk “From Zero to Hero and Back again – My Decade in Fedora Land”. A lot of great old photos and discussion. Ah memories.

Since I am in the server working group, I decided it might be a good idea for me to next go to Stephen Gallagher’s “State of the Fedora Server edition” session. There were some interesting ideas here, many around leveraging cockpit as our deployment/management application. Several people promised to mail the server list their ideas, so I look forward to hearing those in the coming weeks.

Next I went to the SIGs roundtable and talked about EPEL with a number of folks. Some great ideas, we will see how they play out in the next year or so.

After that I went into hallway track mode and talked to various folks.

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Flock 2018: Day 1

by on 2018/08/14 at 11:35 am
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

After a nice sleep and breakfast things started out with announcements then the state of Fedora talk from the FPL, Matthew Miller.

Summary: doing pretty well, but we should try and get the numbers of users estimates more accurate, and keep doing the good work on all the things we have in the pipeline for the next few years.

Fedora Objective leads then gave updates on their objectives.

  • Matthias Clasen talked about all the good stuff in Fedora Workstation over the last few releases
  • Langdon White updated us on Modularity
  • Stephen Gallagher talked about Fedora Server and directions for upcoming work
  • Dusty Mabe talked about Feodora CoreOS and Atomic host. We should see a combined setup for f30.
  • Peter Robinson talked about Internet of Things and plans for it coming up.

Overall a great bit of info on where we are and what we had done this last year. There seemed to be more excitement in the air than last year.

In the middle of the above reporting we took a coffee break. I won’t mention them again, but I’d like to note here that they worked really really well. There was an area setup with coffee and pastries and some tables with no chairs and everyone could mingle around and talk. It was a really great way to have a “hall way” track without missing any talks. Since it was all in the same area you could often find whoever you wanted to talk with, or wait for others to come talk to you. Kudos to the organizers!

Lunch was in the hotel resturant, buffet style. Was pretty good overall and was nice to avoid travel time, etc.

After lunch, I went to the “RHEL, Fedora and CentOS: Solving the penrose triangle” talk by Josh Boyer and Brenden Conaboy. It’s very true that there is not a normal direct upstream -> downstream flow to the relationship between these three, and they had some interesting ideas on how we could make the feedback better and understand it more.

Next was the Fedora Infrastructure onboarding talk by Ricky Elrod. This is a topic that is near and dear to me, so it was great to see the ideas and also to see the interaction from the audience. There were a bunch of questions and ideas. I hope we can implement some of them soon and see if they help folks out or not.

After that, I went to the session on improving compose times with Mohan Boddu and Lubomir Seldar. This one had a bunch of good ideas on how we can get our compose processes down in time from the current 8-9hours to much less. There was a lot of audience participation here. Great to see!

The next slot there were several things I wanted to see, but I ended up in the hallway track talking to lots of people, so that was all good too.

I think the talks this year were all recorded so they should appear soon I hope and folks can see them for themselves.

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Flock 2018 – day -2 and -1 (travel, it’s a blur)

by on 2018/08/07 at 1:19 pm
Posted In: fedora, flock, linux

This year flock ( https://flocktofedora.org ), our yearly Fedora mega get-together is in Dresden Germany.

Since I am near Salem, OR in the USA, it’s a fair bit of travel:

  • 9am monday (2018-08-06) – drive to Portland airport
  • 10am get to the long term parking and take a shuttle to the terminal.
  • 11am have a quick lunch before boarding my flight
  • 12:30pm, off from Portland to Amsterdam (10.5 hour flight)
  • 8:30am (2018-08-07 now) – arrive at AMS.
  • 12:30pm flight from AMS to Dresden
  • 1:30pm arrive Dresden, head to hotel.
  • 2:30pm Hotel checkin.

Then I just had to manage to stay awake until after dinner.

Flock is always a great conference! So many old and new friends, great talks and energy for the coming year.

Should be a great one again!

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OpenShift in Fedora Infrastructure NEWS

by on 2018/06/03 at 2:56 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

I thought I would share today some history, recent happenings and plans for OpenShift in Fedora Infrastructure.

We currently have two OpenShift clusters running in Fedora Infra (not counting two more dedicated to osbs, the container build system). One of these is our staging instance and the other our production instance. Astute readers who know OpenShift may ask why we even bother with a staging cluster, since a lot of workflows with OpenShift let you test and validate things and deploy them as you like. Well, there’s a few reasons we set things up this way: First we don’t have all that many apps moved into OpenShift yet, so they have to interact with all the rest of our staging deployments on vm’s. Also until recently it wasn’t easy to seperate routes in Openshift to make sure you were only sending staging messages to the staging network and not ever mixing in the production network (this has since been vastly improved, but haven’t taken advantage of the new functionality yet). Finally we wanted to make sure we had a test bed for deploying and upgrading the clusters without just having to do all that work in production. Or production cluster has 3 apps running in it currently: bodhi’s web frontend, waiverdb and greenwave. Or staging instance has those three, as well as a number of not quite completed apps: modernpaste, rats, release-monitoring, librariesio2fedmsg, and transstats.

Last week I went ahead and reinstalled both our staging cluster (on wed) and then our production cluster (thursday). I had actually upgraded our staging cluster from 3.7 to 3.9, but I wanted to make sure we could redeploy from the ground up. Production had been on version 3.6 (upgraded from 3.5). The nodes we were using were actually sized when we installed 3.5 and the requirements changed after that making them too small. I had re-installed the compute nodes ok, but the masters didn’t go as well, so I figured it would be a good time to just reinstall completely with the right sizes and 3.9. Additionally, support was added in 3.9 to use cri-o instead of docker containers and we wanted to take advantage of that, as well as adding persistent storage for our registery so we didn’t need to rebuild images all the time. There were various hiccups and issues in our config, but after staging we didn’t hit too many in production. All our apps are now using cri-o containers!

Our plans moving forward include:

  • Moving more apps into OpenShift. It’s still not as smooth as we would like to do initial config, but we hope to improve that and after an app is setup, it’s much nicer for everyone to maintain and deploy from there.
  • We want to improve our ansible setup for deploying / managing apps. Right now our roles and setup are very flexable, but if we change them to be more opinionated we can hopefully make it easier for people to run apps there.
  • As soon as our new cloud is up and running we plan to deploy a OpenShift there. I have been calling it a ‘dev’ env but I am not sure I think thats the right name now. It might be better to think of it as ‘manage your own’. We hope to give people who need it wide access there. The downside is of course if we do a reinstall everyone would have to redeploy their apps.
  • Someday we should just have our staging cluster to use for upgrades/re-installs and have all our apps in one prod cluster.
  • Someday it would be great to pull from upstream git a prod or a stg branch and build and deploy from it. Most of our apps currently are just using rpms, so it doesn’t save as much work on deployments.
  • We definitely want to move as many apps as make sense over, just will need some elbow grease.

It’s exciting to see all the improvements to OpenShift over the last year. It just gets better and better!

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Fedora 28 Released

by on 2018/05/01 at 3:32 pm
Posted In: fedora, linux

In case you didn’t hear it all the other places you would normally hear it: Fedora 28 is out. Get it! https://getfedora.org/

I updated my servers here at home last friday, as usual 0 problems at all with the upgrade. Upgrades really are painless these days.

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