CentOS Community Newsletter, August 2019 (#1908)

August 07, 2019 07:02 PM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
It's been another busy month, but better a few days late than never!
If you'd like to help out with the process of putting together the newsletter, please see the Contributing section at the end. We're always looking for help!

Releases and updates

We had a very large number of updates/enhancements in July:

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during July:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during July:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during July:

Events

Last week we were at DevConf.in in Bangalore. If you dropped by, thanks!
Next week - August 14th - we'll be gathering at Boston University, in Boston, Massachusetts, for the second annual CentOS Dojo at DevConf.US. There's still space to register, if you wish to attend. In addition to the regular sessions, there will be an opportunity to give lightning talks about what you're working on, as requested by last year's attendees. More details are available on the event wiki page.
And the week after that - August 21-23 - we will be at the Open Source Summit in San Diego. Drop by to see us at the Red Hat booth!
If you are presenting anything about CentOS, at any event anywhere in the world, please do let us know, so that we can promote your presence there, and your talk.
If you'd like to run a CentOS Dojo, or other community event, we may be able to help. Get in touch via the centos-devel mailing list, or via our Twitter account @CentOSProject.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • Tell us what you're working on
  • Provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • Tell us about an event that you attended where there was CentOS content
  • Write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • Tell us about a news article that covered the use of CentOS in an interesting way
  • Suggest an topic that you'd like to see someone else write an article on
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

August 06, 2019

CentOS Dojo at DevConf.US – August 14th, 2019 in Boston

August 06, 2019 04:11 PM
CentOS Blog
The CentOS Project is pleased to be hosting a one-day Dojo, in conjunction with the upcoming DevConfUS conference, on August 14, 2019.
The one-day event, located on the campus of Boston University in the George Sherman Union Building, will feature talks on:
  • Running CentOS and Terraform on AWS
  • Supercomputing at NC State University
  • An Introduction to Keylime
  • Using Applications Streams
  • Lightning talks about what you’re working on
The event is free, but attendees should register for the event so planners can get an idea of attendance. 
In the evening we’ll be gathering at a local watering hole for less formal discussions, accompanied by food and great local beers - location to be announced on the day of the event!
CentOS will continue its presence at DevConfUS with a booth and various talks, so even if you miss the Dojo, there’s still plenty of time to meet with folks working on CentOS. We look forward to seeing you soon!

July 10, 2019

CentOS Atomic Host 7.1906 Available for Download

July 10, 2019 10:37 PM
CentOS Blog
The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1906), an operating system designed to run Linux containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:
  • atomic-1.22.1-26.gitb507039.el7.centos.x86_64
  • rpm-ostree-client-2018.5-2.atomic.el7.x86_64
  • ostree-2018.5-1.el7.x86_64
  • cloud-init-18.2-1.el7.centos.2.x86_64
  • docker-1.13.1-96.gitb2f74b2.el7.centos.x86_64
  • kernel-3.10.0-957.21.3.el7.x86_64
  • podman-1.3.2-1.git14fdcd0.el7.centos.x86_64
  • flannel-0.7.1-4.el7.x86_64
  • etcd-3.3.11-2.el7.centos.x86_64

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, or qcow2 image. For links to media, see the CentOS wiki.

Upgrading

If you’re running a previous version of CentOS Atomic Host, you can upgrade to the current image by running the following command:
# atomic host upgrade

Release Cycle

The CentOS Atomic Host image follows the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host cadence. After sources are released, they’re rebuilt and included in new images. After the images are tested by the SIG and deemed ready, we announce them.

Getting Involved

CentOS Atomic Host is produced by the CentOS Atomic SIG, based on upstream work from Project Atomic. If you’d like to work on testing images, help with packaging, documentation – join us!
You’ll often find us in #atomic and/or #centos-devel if you have questions. You can also join the atomic-devel mailing list if you’d like to discuss the direction of Project Atomic, its components, or have other questions.

Getting Help

If you run into any problems with the images or components, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list.
Have questions about using Atomic? See the atomic mailing list or find us in the #atomic channel on Freenode.

July 09, 2019

IBM, Red Hat, and CentOS

July 09, 2019 02:50 PM
CentOS Blog
CentOS community,
Today marks a new day in the 26-year history of Red Hat. IBM has finalized its acquisition of Red Hat which will operate as a distinct unit within IBM moving forward.
What does this mean for Red Hat’s contributions to the CentOS project?
In short, nothing.
Red Hat always has and will continue to be a champion for open source and projects like CentOS. IBM is committed to Red Hat’s independence and role in open source software communities so that we can continue this work without interruption or changes.
Our mission, governance, and objectives remain the same. We will continue to execute the existing project roadmap. Red Hat associates will continue to contribute to the upstream in the same ways they have been. And, as always, we will continue to help upstream projects be successful and contribute to welcoming new members and maintaining the project.
We will do this together, with the community, as we always have.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about today’s news, I encourage you to review the list of materials below. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright will host an online Q&A session in the coming days where you can ask questions you may have about what the acquisition means for Red Hat and our involvement in open source communities. Details will be announced on the Red Hat blog
More info:

July 07, 2019

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1905.01)

July 07, 2019 06:19 AM
CentOS Blog
We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.10 and CentOS Linux 7.6.1810 for x86_64. All included packages have been updated to May 30th, 2019.

Known Issues

  1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile:
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"
    We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.
  2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true
    to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".
  3. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools
  4. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. We don't have access to any Windows computer, but some people reported that adding the following line to the Vagrantfile fixed the problem:
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.
If you never used our images before:
vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7
Existing users can upgrade their images:
vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:
$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc
Once you are sure that the checksums are properly signed by the CentOS Project, you have to include them in your Vagrantfile (Vagrant unfortunately ignores the checksum provided from the command line). Here's the relevant snippet from my own Vagrantfile, using v1803.01 and VirtualBox:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox, override|
    virtualbox.memory = 1024
    override.vm.box_download_checksum_type = "sha256"
    override.vm.box_download_checksum = "b24c912b136d2aa9b7b94fc2689b2001c8d04280cf25983123e45b6a52693fb3"
    override.vm.box_url = "https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1803_01.VirtualBox.box"
  end
end

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or in #centos on Freenode IRC.

Ackowledgements

I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.
I would also like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):
  • Graham Mainwaring, for helping with tests and validations;
  • Michael Vermaes, for testing our official images, as well as for writing the detailed guide to using them with VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro;
  • Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.

July 03, 2019

CentOS Community Newsletter, July 2019 (#1907)

July 03, 2019 07:08 PM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
Yes, I'm running a little behind schedule with this month's newsletter. That's because I just got back from the Open Source Summit in Shanghai, where I met a number of CentOS enthusiasts. More about that a little later.

June 17, 2019

CentOS 8 Status 17-June-2019

June 17, 2019 01:26 PM
CentOS Blog
Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (on 07-May) we've been looking
into the tools that we use to build CentOS Linux. We've chosen to use the Koji
buildsystem for RPMs, paired with the Module Build Service for modules, delivered through a distribution called Mbox.
Mbox allows us to run the Koji Hub (the central job orchestrator), and the Module Build Service in an instance of OKD that we maintain specifically for our buildsystem work. We have 2 instances of mbox; one for the primary architectures (x86_64, ppc64le, and aarch64), and one for the secondary architecture (armhfp). OKD lets us run those instances on the same hardware but in separate namespaces. The builder machines are separate from the OKD cluster, and connect back to the individual buildsystems that they're assigned to.
As usual, you can find the sources for the RPMs and Modules that make up CentOS 8 at https://git.centos.org
Also as usual, we don't forecast dates on when CentOS 8 will release for General Availability, but we will release it as soon as it's ready.
You can follow live updates here: https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8

Some Statistics so Far:

Total non-modular Packages: 2542
Packages Built: 2523
Updates to Build: 25
Failed Packages: 17
Total number of Module/Streams: 61
Modules Built: 14
Failed Modules: 0
Secure boot shim status: Done

Challenges

If you've been following progress closely, you may have noticed that the buildsystems seemed quiet over the past week or so. We were almost through the entire non-modular build cycle when we noticed some modules were required for building the next batch of non-modular packages. We focused, then, on building some of the necessary modules but found some of their dependencies were not pushed to git.centos.org. That problem has since been resolved, and we expect to resume module builds (and unblock the rest of the 17 failed packages) sometime this week.

What's Next?

Once the builds are complete, we are also investigating a consolidated approach to composing the repositories and other artifacts (like cloud images) that make up CentOS 8. See the centos-devel mailing list for discussion on the structure of these artifacts.
We still need to do the following things:
  • Finish all of the component builds
  • Sign all of the built RPMs
  • Send a compose to the QA group for testing
  • Finalize the repo structure on the mirrors
  • Compose CentOS 8
Stay tuned for a followup blog post with another update and Frequently Asked Questions

June 04, 2019

CentOS Community Newsletter, June 2019 (#1906)

June 04, 2019 07:17 AM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
As in most years, May was extremely busy.

The Status of CentOS 8

We'll start with the question that appears to be on everyone's mind.
As you may know by this point, on May 7th, at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. You can read the full announcement on the Red Hat Developer Blog.
Since CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL, you can expect that the release of RHEL 8 will lead to the release of CentOS 8. And, of course, the most frequent question we received at Red Hat Summit, in the CentOS booth, was "when is CentOS 8 coming out?"
We don't have a definitive answer to this, because, especially with a new major release, there can be unforeseen complications. However, historically, a RHEL release is typically followed by the CentOS release within one or two months, so you can probably expect that general timeline.
We've also put up a wiki page that will track the day-to-day status of the rebuild effort. We ask that you follow that page, rather than asking on the mailing list for daily updates, and we will endeavor to keep that page current with daily changes in status.

Releases and updates

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0

In May at the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This, in turn, triggered the start of the process to build CentOS 8. This is discussed in more detail in the news item above.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during May:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during May:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during May:

Other Announcements

The following announcements also happened during May:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.
We have the following SIG reports this month:

CentOS Opstools SIG Quarterly Report

Mar 01, 2019 - May 31 2019

Purpose

provide tools and, documentation, recommendations and best practices
for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

The past state still continues, we are not attracting new contributors.

Health and Activity

CentOS opstools packages are being consumed by OpenStack Kolla, and
at the same time, for example also by oVirt.
For the future, we are removing messaging-related packages over
to the CentOS messaging SIG.

Issues for the Board

None at this point, but we should keep an eye on contributors.

Scientific SIG

In recent months, the Scientific Linux project announced that they would discontinue their work and move to CentOS 8 for the future. As a result, there are discussions happening about forming a Scientific SIG to continue their work under the CentOS umbrella. You should see more about this on the centos-devel mailing list in the coming weeks.

Events

As we've mentioned in the past two newsletters, in April we had the CentOS Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs, Tennessee. I'll bring it up one last time to mention that the videos from the event - the full presentations, and interviews with several of the presenters - are now on our YouTube channel. There's a great presentation from John Turner, talking about what work ORNL does with their supercomputers (running CentOS and RHEL!), and that's a good place to start.
Then, in May, many CentOS community members congregated at Red Hat Summit in Boston. After the RHEL 8 release was announced, Jim Perrin addressed a crowd of people who had questions about what changes are coming for CentOS 8. Questions ranged from timing (addressed elsewhere in this newsletter) to questions about issues raised in the recent post on the Red Hat blog about experimenting with newer functionality in CentOS before it hits RHEL. We're looking forward to the coming year, and how you, our users, will be able to contribute to this process. We also want to hear your thoughts on what this future might look like.
There are still a number of events coming up this year where you can meet and interact with the CentOS community.
I'd particularly like to highlight, again, the CentOS Dojo at DevConf.US in Boston, August 18th. We now have a tentative schedule, but there's probably room for another presentation or two, if you're going to be in the area and have something to share. Based on feedback last year, we've added a lightning talks section, where you can give 5-10 minute presentations on what you've been working on. And we'll have Jim Perrin talking about what's happening around CentOS 8, which will presumably be released by that time. We hope to see you there!
If you're interested in hosting a Dojo at your organization or business, please get in touch with me, at rbowen@centosproject.org, with your proposed event.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • Tell us what you're working on
  • Provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • Tell us about an event that you attended where there was CentOS content
  • Write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • Tell us about a news article that covered the use of CentOS in an interesting way
  • Suggest an topic that you'd like to see someone else write an article on
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

May 09, 2019

CentOS 8.0.1905 build status

May 09, 2019 12:38 PM
CentOS Blog
Hi,
As everybody is probably aware now, RHEL 8.0 was released earlier this week .
Instead of publishing multiple blog posts here and then point to updated content, we decided this time to have a dedicated wiki page that can be used to track our current status : https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8
So now you can look at that page while we're busy on those tasks, and refresh from time to time.
Let's spread the news about the wiki page and point people (on mailing-lists, irc, forums, etc) to that page to get all latest news about CentOS 8.0.1905 build status !

May 07, 2019

CentOS Storage SIG Quarterly Report

May 07, 2019 02:33 PM
CentOS Blog

Purpose

To make CentOS a suitable platform for many different storage solutions. It should be very simple for users to deploy CentOS with the components of storage projects of their choice.

Membership Update

Ceph and Gluster are current projects in the CentOS Storage SIG. We have been in touch with other storage projects that have expressed interest, but nothing has come out of that yet. In addition to hoping to onboard new projects, we would also welcome new contributors that are interested in updating and testing packages when new upstream releases are available. Both Ceph and Gluster project consist out of a number of packages, and the few maintainers that keep these updated welcome assistance.

Releases and Packages

Ceph

...

Gluster

In the end of March Gluster 6 has been released and announced on the CentOS announce list. This comes with a new centos-release-gluster6 package that replaces the Provides: centos-release-gluster of the Gluster 5 release. New deployments that install centos-release-gluster to enable the most current maintained Gluster release, will automatically get Gluster 6. Older installations will not automatically be updated, but instead stay on the Gluster version that they have. With the release of Gluster 6 there has not been a deprecation from older Gluster versions. For details on what versions are maintained, see the Gluster Community Release Schedule.
Other versions still maintained by the Storage SIG are Gluster 4.1 and Gluster 5. Users can still consume these versions by installing centos-release-gluster41or centos-release-gluster5.

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, May 2019 (#1905)

May 07, 2019 07:05 AM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
Another month into 2019, and we have a lot to tell you about.

#CentOS15

Yes, we've mentioned this before, but we're still pretty stoked about it. On the 15th, we celebrated our 15th birthday with a small group of friends in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, before our Dojo at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. You can see some of the videos from that event beginning to appear on our YouTube channel.
If you would like to talk about your involvement in CentOS, please get in touch with Rich at rbowen@centosproject.org  You don't need to be one of the founders - just to have something interesting to say about your involvement, past, present, and future.

git.centos.org changes

As we mentioned last month, there have been some significant changes to git.centos.org. The service was upgraded/migrated to Pagure. You can read details about the change, and instructions on using the new service on the mailing list archive. And further documentation is now in the wiki, at https://wiki.centos.org/Sources
If you have any questions or difficulties using the new service, please drop by either the centos-devel mailing list, or the #centos-devel IRC channel on Freenode.

Releases and updates

We had another moderately busy month for update and releases.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during April:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during April:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during April:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.
We have the following SIG reports this month:

NFV SIG

The NFV SIG posted their report to the CentOS blog.

Storage SIG

This is by no means a complete report but here are a few "juicy" notes
hopefully worth sharing!
Starting in May we'll have a new member in the Storage SIG: Francesco
Pantano, he'll start helping us with the maintenance of the
Ceph/ceph-ansible builds (and their deps).
We have in fact finally populated our Ceph Nautilus repo with a initial
Ceph Nautilus build and we also included RC builds of ceph-ansible;
please help us test both Ceph and the deployment tool itself enabling
the SIG repos by installing the new centos-release-ceph-nautilus package.
We're looking for help with the new builds test automation; ideally we'd
like to have automatic promotion into -release repos of the new builds
when these pass testing; if you can or are interested in helping us with
this effort please get in touch!
See you online.

Cloud SIG

Purpose
Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based Private cloud infrastructure applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.
Membership Update
We are always looking for new members, especially representation from cloud technologies other than RDO.
Releases and PackagesRDO
April 8 - 12 OpenStack Stein Released https://blogs.rdoproject.org/2019/04/rdo-stein-released/
Interesting things in the Stein release include:
- Ceph Nautilus is the default version of Ceph, a free-software storage platform, implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster, and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage, within RDO (or is it the default without OpenStack?).  Within Nautilus, the Ceph Dashboard has gained a lot of new functionality like support for multiple users / roles, SSO (SAMLv2) for user authentication, auditing support, a new landing page showing more metrics and health info, I18N support, and REST API documentation with Swagger API.
- The extracted Placement service, used to track cloud resource inventories and usages to help other services effectively manage and allocate their resources, is now packaged as part of RDO. Placement has added the ability to target a candidate resource provider, easing specifying a host for workload migration, increased API performance by 50% for common scheduling operations, and simplified the code by removing unneeded complexity, easing future maintenance.
Other improvements include:
- The TripleO deployment service, used to develop and maintain tooling and infrastructure able to deploy OpenStack in production, using OpenStack itself wherever possible, added support for podman and buildah for containers and container images. Open Virtual Network (OVN) is now the default network configuration and TripleO now has improved composable network support for creating L3 routed networks and IPV6 network support.
  •  April 28 - May 1 OpenInfrastructure Summit Denver Colorado USA
  • May 2 - 4 Train Release Project Team Gathering Denver Colorado USA
  • June 3 - 7 Train Milestone 1
  • June 13 - 14 RDO Test Days Train Milestone 1
Health and Activity
The Cloud SIG remains fairly healthy. However, it is still, for the most part, a monoculture containing only OpenStack.
Issues for the Board
We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.
---
As always, a big thank you to our SIGs, for the work that they do, and for the time taken to check back in with these status reports!

Events

In April, as mentioned above, we ran a CentOS Dojo at ORNL - Oak Ridge National Labs. The presentation slides are starting to get added to  the event website. We expect to have the full video from the event within the next week or two.
I'm writing this newsletter from the  Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly known as OpenStack Summit), in Denver. We joined our friends from RDO and Ceph, as well as our colleagues from Red Hat, to discuss all aspects of open infrastructure, especially OpenStack.
A high point included the gathering of some of the largest open science clusters on the planet, running their OpenStack/RDO clouds on CentOS
And, coming up, we're planning to run a CentOS Dojo in Boston, on the day before DevConf.US. The call for presentations is open, and we want to hear from you! Talks about anything you're doing in, on, or around CentOS is fair game. Submit your talks HERE.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

May 01, 2019

NFV SIG Quarterly Report

May 01, 2019 05:13 PM
CentOS Blog
NFV SIG Quarterly Report through May 1st, 2019

Purpose

The CentOS NFV  SIG exists to support Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in CentOS. Specifically, the idea is to be a vehicle to provide packages for implementers of software networks on the CentOS platform.

Membership Update

In this reporting period, we have had little formal participation. However, there has been continued in NFV on CentOS and interest in deploying our packages on CentOS. We are always looking for additional community participation in all aspects of this SIG, including promoting, building releasing other packages for NFV.
Anyone interested in participating in the NFV SIG should subscribe to the generic CentOS mailing list.

Releases and Packages

fd.io VPP

The past quarter has been a somewhat slow one in terms of actual delivered packages.
However, we did release vpp 19.01.
The outlook for vpp 19.04 and 19.08 is TBD at this point.

DPDK

There has been some renewed interest in dpdk packaging. At this point, there is no immediate plans to release recent DPDK in NFV SIG.
We would welcome a sponsor to work with the NFV SIG upstream community to bring recent dpdk packages into CentOS NFV SIG.

Health and Activity

The health of NFV SIG could be better. It was originally perceived as the sponsor for getting OPNFV project into the CentOS distribution. However, subsequently OPNFV releases its own CD images. Subsequently it was primarily sponsoring building opendaylight packages which are still built as part of the upstream product CI.
Since Q1 2018 the project has been focused on building packages and dependencies for upstream fast data plane project, fd.io
In April, vpp 1901 has been released to mirrors and is currently available in build-logs.
At this point, the NFV SIG is continuing to look for a renewed focus. In particular, we are looking for packages to facilitate containerization and kubernetes. Other ideas and sponsors are welcome.

Issues for the Board

We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.

April 28, 2019

Renew/Extend Puppet CA/puppetmasterd certs

April 28, 2019 10:00 PM
Fabian Arrotin

Puppet CA/puppetmasterd cert renewal

While we're still converting our puppet controlled infra to Ansible, we still have some nodes "controlled" by puppet, as converting some roles isn't something that can be done in just one or two days. Add to that other items in your backlog that all have priority set to #1 and then time is flying, until you realize this for your existing legacy puppet environment (assuming false FQDN here, but you'll get the idea):
Warning: Certificate 'Puppet CA: puppetmasterd.domain.com' will expire on 2019-05-06T12:12:56UTC
Warning: Certificate 'puppetmasterd.domain.com' will expire on 2019-05-06T12:12:56UTC
So, as long as your PKI setup for puppet is still valid, you can act in advance, resign/extend CA and puppetmasterd and distribute newer CA certs to agents, and go forward with other items in your backlog, while still converting from puppet to Ansible (at least for us)

Puppetmasterd/CA

Before anything else, (in case you don't backup this, but you should), let's take a backup on the Puppet CA (in our case, it's a Foreman driven puppetmasterd, so foreman host is where all this will happen, YMMV)
tar cvzf /root/puppet-ssl-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/puppet/ssl/

CA itself

We first need to regenerate the CSR for the CA cert, and sign it again Ideally we confirm that the ca_key.pem and the existing ca_crt.pem "matches" through modulus (should be equals)
cd /var/lib/puppet/ssl/ca
( openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in ca_key.pem  2> /dev/null | openssl md5 ; openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in ca_crt.pem  2> /dev/null | openssl md5 ) 

(stdin)= cbc4d35f58b28ad7c4dca17bd4408403
(stdin)= cbc4d35f58b28ad7c4dca17bd4408403
As it's the case, we can now Regenerate from that private key and existing crt a CSR
openssl x509 -x509toreq -in ca_crt.pem -signkey ca_key.pem -out ca_csr.pem
Getting request Private Key
Generating certificate request
Now that we have the CSR for CA, we need to sign it again, but we have to add extensions
cat > extension.cnf << EOF
[CA_extensions]
basicConstraints = critical,CA:TRUE
nsComment = "Puppet Ruby/OpenSSL Internal Certificate"
keyUsage = critical,keyCertSign,cRLSign
subjectKeyIdentifier = hash
EOF
And now archive old CA crt and sign (new) extended one
cp ca_crt.pem ca_crt.pem.old
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in ca_csr.pem -signkey ca_key.pem -out ca_crt.pem -extfile extension.cnf -extensions CA_extensions
Signature ok
subject=/CN=Puppet CA: puppetmasterd.domain.com
Getting Private key

openssl x509 -in ca_crt.pem -noout -text|grep -A 3 Validity
 Validity
            Not Before: Apr 29 08:25:49 2019 GMT
            Not After : Apr 26 08:25:49 2029 GMT

Puppetmasterd server

We have also to regen the CSR from the existing cert (assuming our fqdn for our cert is correctly also the currently set hostname)
cd /var/lib/puppet/ssl
openssl x509 -x509toreq -in certs/$(hostname).pem -signkey private_keys/$(hostname).pem -out certificate_requests/$(hostname)_csr.pem
Getting request Private Key
Generating certificate request
Now that we have CSR, we can sign with new CA
cp certs/$(hostname).pem certs/$(hostname).pem.old #Backing up
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in certificate_requests/$(hostname)_csr.pem -CA ca/ca_crt.pem \
  -CAkey ca/ca_key.pem -CAserial ca/serial -out certs/$(hostname).pem
Signature ok
Validating that puppetmasted key and new certs are matching (so crt and private keys are ok)
( openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in private_keys/$(hostname).pem  2> /dev/null | openssl md5 ; openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in certs/$(hostname).pem 2> /dev/null | openssl md5 )

(stdin)= 0ab385eb2c6e9e65a4ed929a2dd0dbe5
(stdin)= 0ab385eb2c6e9e65a4ed929a2dd0dbe5
It seems all good, so let's restart puppetmasterd/httpd (foremand launches puppetmasterd for us)
systemctl restart puppet

Puppet agents

From this point, puppet agents will not complain about the puppetmasterd cert, but still about the fact that CA itself will expire soon :
Warning: Certificate 'Puppet CA: puppetmasterd.domain.com' will expire on 2019-05-06T12:12:56GMT
But as we have now the new ca_crt.pem at the puppetmasterd/foreman side, we can just distribute it on clients (through puppet or ansible or whatever) and then it will continue to work
cd /var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs
mv ca.pem ca.pem.old
And now distribute the new ca_crt.pem as ca.pem here
puppet snippet for this (in our puppet::agent class)
 file { '/var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem': 
   source => 'puppet:///puppet/ca_crt.pem', 
   owner => 'puppet', 
   group => 'puppet', 
   require => Package['puppet'],
 }
Next time you'll "puppet agent -t" or that puppet will contact puppetmasterd, it will apply the new cert on and on next call, no warning, issue anymore
Info: Computing checksum on file /var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem
Info: /Stage[main]/Puppet::Agent/File[/var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem]: Filebucketed /var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem to puppet with sum c63b1cc5a39489f5da7d272f00ec09fa
Notice: /Stage[main]/Puppet::Agent/File[/var/lib/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem]/content: content changed '{md5}c63b1cc5a39489f5da7d272f00ec09fa' to '{md5}e3d2e55edbe1ad45570eef3c9ade051f'
Hope it helps

April 15, 2019

Happy 15th Birthday CentOS!

April 15, 2019 07:03 AM
CentOS Blog
Today, CentOS turns 15 years old. It’s had hard times and good times, and gone through a number of big changes over those years. We feel that we’ve landed in a really great place, over the last 5 years, as part of the Red Hat family of projects, and we’re very excited about what’s coming with CentOS 8, and the years to come.
Right now, we want to look back at how we got where we are now. We did that by going back and talking with some of the people that were involved in those early years, as well as some that joined the project later on.
We started by talking with Greg Kurtzer, who was the original founder of the project. In this interview, he told us about the motivations for starting the project, as well as some of the community challenges that were faced in those first years.
Along the way, Greg had an opportunity to very intentionally set the tone of the community to be welcoming and tolerant. This was primarily because Greg had has some very negative experiences with some of the very hostile communities in those early years. We talked a little bit about those intentional changes in the second half of our interview.
Our next interview was with Manuel “Wolfy” Wolfshant, who was also involved almost from the beginning. He began as a user, and quickly moved to building packages, which he needed for work, but decided to share with the world. He also was then, and is now, very involved in user support in the forums.
That interview can be read on the CentOS blog at https://blog.centos.org/2019/04/centos15-wolfy/
While at FOSDEM, in Brussels, in February, I talked with two members of the community. Mike McLean, a contributor to the project, and the author of the Koji tool that is used extensively in CentOS and Fedora, talked about his contributions:
And Brian Stinson, a more recent addition to the community, talked about his work in the CI and infrastructure of the project:
Our community is very dependent on people that actually use CentOS in production, because they are the people who find the problems, and who have insight into changes that should be made. They also are our most valuable contributors to user support, because they’ve been there, and know how to fix things when they break. Jeff Sheltren is one of those people, and has been using CentOS since the very beginning. Over time, he’s become part of the centos-qa group that helps test and package new versions of the distribution.
And finally, we have an interview with Karsten Wade, who was very instrumental in bringing CentOS into the Red Hat family, and continues to act as the liaison between the CentOS board, and Red Hat, although his position has changed over the years as I (Rich Bowen) have moved full time into that community manager role.
In the coming months, we’ll continue to do these interviews. If you’re part of the CentOS community, we’d like to hear from you - how you got involved, and how your role has changed as you’ve gotten more involved over the years. Get in touch with Rich - rbowen@centosproject.org - and we’ll talk.
Happy Birthday, CentOS. And here’s hoping that the next 15 years are even better. Come see us at Red Hat Summit next month to hear about what’s coming in CentOS 8, and what’s next for our community!

April 02, 2019

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, April 2019 (#1904)

April 02, 2019 08:30 AM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
Another month into 2019, and we have a lot to tell you about.

#CentOS15

CentOS turns 15 this month!
We've been talking with some of the people who have been around since the beginning, and a few that joined us a little later on. And we'll be doing more of these interviews in the coming weeks and months. Here's a few of the interviews about how things have changed over the years.
Greg Kurtzer, who originally founded the project, talks about those early days.
Mike McLean talks a little about the transition over the years after that, and about CentOS joining the Red Hat family.
Manuel "Wolfy" Wolfshant talks about the path for someone to get involved in the project by jumping in and doing things that you see need doing.
If you would like to talk about your involvement in CentOS, please get in touch with Rich at rbowen@centosproject.org  You don't need to be one of the founders - just to have something interesting to say about your involvement, past, present, and future.

Changes coming to git.centos.org

If you contribute to the CentOS project, you need to be aware of changes that are coming to git.centos.org. To summarize, we're migrating from Gitblit to Pagure, effective April 8th. For the full details, please see this thread on centos-devel, and this new page in the wiki.

Releases and updates

While not as busy as February, we had a number of significant updates released in March.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during March:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during March:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during March:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.

Software Collections SIG

The Software Collections SIG reports a slow quarter, which is expected. Red Hat collections, from which this SIG builds, are released twice a year. This naturally leads to every other quarter being fairly silent.

Platform as a Service SIG

The PaaS SIG also reports a slow quarter. The main citizen of this SIG, OpenShift, is moving many of their components to containers, leaving less for the SIG to do.
However, there are some potential projects coming up. And, as always, there's lots of room for new contributors to come in and work on areas that interest them. Please do show up on the mailing list, or the IRC channel, to discuss what you'd like to work on.

Events

In two weeks, we'll be running a CentOS Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), where we'll be featuring talks focused on the kind of scientific research computing that goes on there. You can see the schedule of speakers and sessions on the event website.
However, we have sold out all of the space at this event, and so registration is now closed.
At the end of the month, CentOS will be at the Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly known as OpenStack Summit), in Denver, in the community pod of the Red Hat booth. Come see us!
And we're ramping up towards Red Hat Summit, where we will be in the Community Central portion of the expo hall! This is one of our biggest events of the year, and we'd love to see you there, in Boston!
And, coming up, we're planning to run a CentOS Dojo in Boston, on the day before DevConf.US. The call for presentations is open, and we want to hear from you! Talks about anything you're doing in, on, or around CentOS is fair game. Submit your talks HERE.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

April 01, 2019

#CentOS15 – Manuel “Wolfy” Wolfshant

April 01, 2019 08:40 AM
CentOS Blog
For our next #CentOS15 profile, I spoke with Manuel "Wolfy" Wolfshant, who has been an active member of our community since the very beginning, shortly after we started working with the WhiteBox Linux community.
(You can see some of the other #CentOS15 interviews on YouTube.)
When Red Hat moved the business model from selling CDs to selling support, his company had a need to provide a Linux desktop operating system, and packages for it.
Wolfy says that his eye was caught by a news article about Johnny Hughes and the Mayor of Tuttle, Oklahoma, Jerry Taylor.
If you weren't around back then, I'll recap. Due to a failed server upgrade, the Mayor of Tuttle woke to find the generic Apache httpd welcome page, and the CentOS logo, on his city's website. He promptly emailed the CentOS project, threatening to turn them over to the FBI if they didn't undo their malicious hack of the site.
Johnny, being Johnny, responded calmly and respectfully, encouraging the Mayor to contact his IT department, and pointing him to resources to help get his site running again. Given this response, Mr. Taylor
got even angrier, and the conversation went downhill from there. But Johnny remained calm, polite, and professional, and helped guide the city IT department to a solution.
You can read more in the article from the Register at the time.
Impressed with Johnny's calm and helpful response, Wolfy went with CentOS, and has been a happy user for many years since that time.
His involvement in the project began with packaging drivers that were needed for machines in the office. It swiftly moved to other areas, including user support, translation, and starting the very active Romanian Linux user group, RLUG, which remains active today.
Over the years, he has worked on the release notes (for a time providing them in Romanian), packaging for Fedora, and the creation and maintenance of the minimal install kickstart during the CentOS 6 days.
He remains active in the IRC channel, on the mailing lists, and in the CentOS Forum, helping new users (and some experienced ones!) navigate their problems with the CentOS operating system. You can find him #centos-devel channel on Freenode IRC under the name 'wolfy', and on the centos-devel mailing list, answering user questions.

March 30, 2019

Welcoming Packet as new sponsor for CentOS.org infra

March 30, 2019 05:24 PM
CentOS Blog
It's not a secret that the CentOS project has always been running on sponsored infra since the beginning of the journey. While over the years we sometimes lost some "sponsors", we are always happy to see new ones joigning us . That's especially true for the infra used to "seed" the CentOS distro and SIGs content to external mirrors, and even more in regions that are less covered.
While we have some nodes in North America and Europe, some other regions are less covered (if not at all). That's why we'd like to say thank you to Packet to have recently sponsored some bare-metal nodes that are now members of our msync network, including (but not limited) to regions like Asia (with one node in Japan !), Europe and America. Welcome !

March 20, 2019

CentOS Atomic Host 7.1902 Available for Download

March 20, 2019 06:36 PM
CentOS Blog
The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1902), an operating system designed to run Linux containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:
  • atomic-1.22.1-26.gitb507039.el7.centos.x86_64
  • rpm-ostree-client-2018.5-2.atomic.el7.x86_64
  • ostree-2018.5-1.el7.x86_64
  • cloud-init-18.2-1.el7.centos.1.x86_64
  • docker-1.13.1-91.git07f3374.el7.centos.x86_64
  • kernel-3.10.0-957.5.1.el7.x86_64
  • podman-0.12.1.2-2.git9551f6b.el7.centos.x86_64
  • flannel-0.7.1-4.el7.x86_64
  • etcd-3.3.11-2.el7.centos.x86_64

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, qcow2 or Amazon Machine image. For links to media, see the CentOS wiki.

Upgrading

If you’re running a previous version of CentOS Atomic Host, you can upgrade to the current image by running the following command:
# atomic host upgrade

Release Cycle

The CentOS Atomic Host image follows the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host cadence. After sources are released, they’re rebuilt and included in new images. After the images are tested by the SIG and deemed ready, we announce them.

Getting Involved

CentOS Atomic Host is produced by the CentOS Atomic SIG, based on upstream work from Project Atomic. If you’d like to work on testing images, help with packaging, documentation – join us!
You’ll often find us in #atomic and/or #centos-devel if you have questions. You can also join the atomic-devel mailing list if you’d like to discuss the direction of Project Atomic, its components, or have other questions.

Getting Help

If you run into any problems with the images or components, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list.
Have questions about using Atomic? See the atomic mailing list or find us in the #atomic channel on Freenode.

Errata/Releases, March 19th 2019

March 20, 2019 02:11 PM
CentOS Blog
A substantial number of released/updates were announced on Tuesday, March 19th, and are listed below. For timely announcements of these updates, subscribe to the centos-announce mailing list, at https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-announce .

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during March:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during March:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during March:

March 05, 2019

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1902.01)

March 05, 2019 08:39 PM
CentOS Blog
We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.10 and CentOS Linux 7.6.1810 for x86_64. All included packages have been updated to February 28th, 2019.

Known Issues

  1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile:
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"
    We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.
  2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true
    to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".
  3. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools
  4. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. We don't have access to any Windows computer, but some people reported that adding the following line to the Vagrantfile fixed the problem:
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.
If you never used our images before:
vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7
Existing users can upgrade their images:
vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:
$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc
Once you are sure that the checksums are properly signed by the CentOS Project, you have to include them in your Vagrantfile (Vagrant unfortunately ignores the checksum provided from the command line). Here's the relevant snippet from my own Vagrantfile, using v1803.01 and VirtualBox:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox, override|
    virtualbox.memory = 1024
    override.vm.box_download_checksum_type = "sha256"
    override.vm.box_download_checksum = "b24c912b136d2aa9b7b94fc2689b2001c8d04280cf25983123e45b6a52693fb3"
    override.vm.box_url = "https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1803_01.VirtualBox.box"
  end
end

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or in #centos on Freenode IRC.

Ackowledgements

I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.
I would also like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):
  • Graham Mainwaring, for helping with tests and validations;
  • Michael Vermaes, for testing our official images, as well as for writing the detailed guide to using them with VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro;
  • Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, March 2019 (#1903)

March 05, 2019 07:49 AM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
Another month into 2019, and we have a lot to tell you about.

CentOS is 15!

As you may have seen either at recent events, or on social media, we're getting ready to celebrate our 15th birthday! As part of that, Rich has been interviewing various people who were around in those early years, to get some of the back-story on how it all happened. You'll start seeing these interviews on the blog in the month of March.
This week, we have published an interview with Greg Kurtzer, who founded the project in the first place.
Later, we'll be publishing interviews with Karsten Wade, Manuel "wolfy" Wolfshant, and Mike McLean, with others to come.
If you would like to talk about your involvement in CentOS, please get in touch with Rich at rbowen@centosproject.org  You don't need to be one of the founders - just to have something interesting to say about your involvement, past, present, and future.

Releases and updates

February was a very busy month for errata and updates. The links below are to the release notes for each update.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during February:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during February:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during February:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.

NFV SIG

There was presentation on NFV SIG at the CentOS dojo.
We hope to get fd.io vpp 19.01 release RPMs in mirrors before the end of February. Stay tuned.
More information on the NFV SIG, including how to get involved, may be found on their wiki page.

Opstools SIG

The opstools SIG has published their quarterly report to the CentOS Blog.
More information on the Opstools SIG, including how to get involved, may be found on their wiki page.

Virtualization SIG

The Virtualization SIG has published their quarterly report to the CentOS Blog.
More information about the Virtualization SIG, including how to get involved, may be found on their wiki page.

Events

FOSDEM was, of course, in February, but we reported on that in last months' newsletter.
This month, we'll be sponsoring FOSSAsia in Singapore! We'll have a CentOS table there, and we'll have participation from numerous of our favorite projects, including Ansible, ManageIQ, Fedora, and Dogtag.
We are ramping up towards the CentOS Dojo at ORNL, which is now just a month and a half away. We have published our speaker list, and the full schedule of talks should be up very soon. Register today to attend! (Registration is free, but due to the nature of the facility, you must register in advance to gain access through security.)
If you would like to host a Dojo, or have a suggestion for where we should have one, please get in touch with the CentOS Promo mailing list.
Other upcoming events are always listed on the events wiki page.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

March 04, 2019

Greg Kurtzer: Founder of the CentOS project

March 04, 2019 08:09 AM
CentOS Blog
As I’ve mentioned, as we approach our 15th anniversary, I’ve been talking with some of the people who were around in those early days, to get more of the backstory. (See our YouTube channel for the full interview.)
Last week, I spoke with Greg Kurtzer, who founded the Caos Linux project, which turned into the CentOS Project in 2002. I got an eye-opening story of how it all started.
In October of 2000, Greg, who was already an avid Debian GNU/Linux fan, joined an organization (LBNL) that was a Red Hat shop. (This was before Red Hat Enterprise Linux.) And, while generating packages for work, he decided that what was really needed was a community-managed distribution of RPM-based Linux, much like Debian existed for the dpkg crowd.
Now, in the early days of open source and free software, we had communities that were more defined by personalities than by technologies. Granted, that situation still exists today, but if you didn’t endure the flame wars of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, it can be a little hard to imagine just how bad it sometimes got.
With Caos Linux, Greg had an opportunity to set a new tone for the project as more welcoming, beginner friendly, and encouraging than was the norm at the time.
When Red Hat Linux became Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the project could no longer use Red Hat Linux as the build system, they began to work with Rocky McGough who was already doing a rebuild of RHEL for his employer. (There were a number of these projects at the time.) He was changing roles professionally, and wanted the project to continue, and so agreed to merge with the work that Greg was doing. Rocky was, effectively, the first technical lead of CentOS. The name itself was coined by a participant in the UK, who will be mentioned again later.
The process was started by Greg to create a 501c3 non-profit entity - the Caos Foundation - which would host the CentOS Project. There was a framework being created to cover governance, funding, and organizing volunteer effort. Unfortunately, the individual who came up with the name ‘CentOS’ also owned the domain name, and declined to release it to the foundation as promised.
Meanwhile, when a RHEL-rebuild project called White Box Linux was discontinued, it became clear that what the community wanted was a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS moved into that space, based on the work that White Box had done.
As CentOS was starting to gain popularity, word came to the project that Rocky had committed suicide. In addition to being very tragic, this presented certain technical difficulties to the project, since he was the technical lead at the time. In hindsight, it is a shame he didn’t get to see what the project would become in time, as the foresight may have prevented this tragedy.
Greg passed on the technical lead position to the individual in the UK who held the domain name, while Greg continued to manage the project, community, and governance side of things. Donations to the project started to come in to support the infrastructure and other needs of the project. And third-party vendors making a business around the project also began to appear and prosper. The project was growing rapidly, and donations to the project were growing rapidly.
From there, due to a number of situations not really germane to this article, Greg moved on, and the CentOS project, through a number of events, came to where it is today. We’ll explore some of these other transitions in upcoming interviews and articles.
Of particular interest to me during my interview with Greg, were his remarks about setting the tone in a project. Being welcoming, kind, and patient takes so little time, but creates a community that people want to participate in, are proud to be part of and which is sustainable for a long time, due to the ability of new participants to enter and feel ownership. I’ve published a separate, much shorter, video with just those remarks, which I’d encourage you take two minutes to watch, too.

March 01, 2019

CentOS Opstools SIG Quarterly Report

March 01, 2019 08:22 AM
CentOS Blog
CentOS Opstools SIG Quarterly Report
Dec 01, 2018 - Feb 28, 2019

Purpose

Provide tools and, documentation, recommendations and best practices for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

We need to be honest to see that contributions decreased over the time. Members moved on, and at the same time, we failed to attract new contributors.

Health and Activity

CentOS opstools packages are being consumed by OpenStack Kolla, and at the same time, for example also by oVirt.
During FOSDEM, we got in touch with collectd upstream. collectd is also integral part of the OPNFV Barometer project. While Barometer provides containers to test the project, the same can be achieved by using packages from CentOS-Opstools.
Architectual-wise, we are shifting from using sensu and fluentd. If anyone is interested in keeping them, it's the right time to step up.
The replacements will be using rsyslog and Prometheus. Currently, we are not building Prometheus under the opstools SIG; interested
persons are encouraged to step up here!

Issues for the Board

None at this point, but we should keep an eye on contributors.

February 27, 2019

CentOS15

February 27, 2019 08:12 AM
CentOS Blog
Happy birthday, CentOS!
15 years ago, the CentOS project started up in order to fill a gap left by a change in the way that Red Hat decided to market their product.
Many of the people that were involved in those early days are still involved today, although in different capacities than they were then. Over they years, their involvement has changed, due to their own changing job responsibilities, as well as the shifting technological landscape.
Over the next few months, as part of our celebration of our 15 year anniversary, I'm going to be talking with some of these people that were involved in the early days, as well as some that have joined later on, to talk about how and why people get involved in this project.
If you would like to tell your story, please get in touch with me at rbowen@centosproject.org and we'll schedule an interview.

February 25, 2019

CentOS Virtualization SIG Quarterly Report, March 2019

February 25, 2019 08:27 AM
CentOS Blog
Virtualization SIG quarterly report, Dec 1 2018 - February 28 2019

Purpose

Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based virtualization applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.

Membership Update

We are always looking for new members.
Tomasz Baranski and Yuval Turgeman joined the SIG for oVirt project.

Releases and Packages

oVirt 4.2 reached end of life with the upstream release of oVirt 4.3. Upstream is planning 4.3.1 to be shipped live on February 26th, the SIG will rebase on that.
On Xen side, Xen 4.8 has been updated to 4.8.5-1
On libvirt side, latest upstream release 5.0 has been tagged for release

Health and Activity

The Virtualization SIG remains fairly healthy. All the projects within the SIG are updating regularly on biweekly meetings.
oVirt had a conference in Milan on November 16th 2018 and is planning a new conference in Rome this spring.
oVirt was also present at Devconf.cz and Fosdem.
Xen 4.10.2 is also available, and the dom0-enabled Linux kernel is at 4.9.127. Release candidate builds of Xen 4.12 are also available.

Issues for the Board

oVirt pushed a patch for having a CentOS appliance including oVirt Guest Agent in https://github.com/CentOS/sig-cloud-instance-build/pull/127
We've updated centos-release-xen to default to Xen 4.8 in the CBS repos.

February 18, 2019

Using buildah to build container images on CentOS

February 18, 2019 09:04 AM
CentOS Blog
In this post, we're going to talk about how to use buildah to build container images on CentOS.
buildah is a command line tool that facilitates building OCI compliant images. There's a plethora of information available around what buildah is on its GitHub landing page so we won't dive more into what it is. However, it's worth mentioning that buildah helps you build container images without having to run any daemon in the background, unlike the docker CLI tool which requires the Docker daemon to be running in the background.

Installing buildah

buildah is already available in the CentOS repos. All we need to do is:
$ yum install -y buildah
$ buildah -v
buildah version 1.5-dev (image-spec 1.0.0, runtime-spec 1.0.0)
buildah offers a number of features and options. To know about these, simply execute buildah on the command line or refer to its manual page (man buildah).

Building the container image

buildah can build a container image by referring the same Dockerfile that docker build refers to. Let's consider this simple Dockerfile for example. All it does is install the wget package:
$ cat Dockerfile
FROM registry.centos.org/centos/centos

RUN yum install -y wget && yum clean all
Now, build the container image named wget :
$ buildah bud -t wget .
$ buildah images
IMAGE ID             IMAGE NAME                                               CREATED AT             SIZE
2f254a4fff8d         registry.centos.org/centos/centos:latest                 Dec 17, 2018 05:07     210 MB
9b6563cfaff2         localhost/wget:latest                                    Jan 16, 2019 11:01     234 MB
You can use this container image with podman by doing:
$ podman run -it --rm wget bash
podman is a tool for managing pods, containers, and container images. Its website contains extensive detail about its capabilities and uses.

Use the container image with Docker

buildah also makes it possible to use the image thus built via the local Docker daemon. It's as simple as doing a buildah push:
$ docker images
REPOSITORY          TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE

$ buildah images
IMAGE ID             IMAGE NAME                                               CREATED AT             SIZE
2f254a4fff8d         registry.centos.org/centos/centos:latest                 Dec 17, 2018 05:07     210 MB
9b6563cfaff2         localhost/wget:latest                                    Jan 16, 2019 11:01     234 MB

$ buildah push wget:latest docker-daemon:registry.centos.org/centos/wget:latest
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob sha256:b05580fca2f9aabb2d8fa975b29146c9147c8418e559f197c54a4fac04babb95
 200.47 MiB / 200.47 MiB [==================================================] 4s
Copying blob sha256:fa5e7b9f8f4d8f07f7af27cd06269ba16ba0f06cbacacc7c7e96a616da885cab
 22.82 MiB / 22.82 MiB [====================================================] 0s
Copying config sha256:9b6563cfaff28baa1075e86b60c502f85fc31b56bdb641d314a7c61d2e91fae8
 1.33 KiB / 1.33 KiB [======================================================] 0s
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
Successfully pushed registry.centos.org/centos/wget:latest@sha256:66f4c1c8378c7d9e22a0d3c9a0943739082dfeae3344e5f2b069e9c9ddf08271

$ docker images
REPOSITORY                        TAG                 IMAGE ID            CREATED             SIZE
registry.centos.org/centos/wget   latest              9b6563cfaff2        6 minutes ago       226 MB
Initially, the local Docker daemon storage had no container images. We did buildah push wget:latest docker-daemon:registry.centos.org/wget:latest to push the image to local Docker daemon's storage. Now doing docker images shows the image and can then be used with docker run

That's it

In this blog, we saw simple steps that need to be performed to install and use buildah to build OCI images which can then be pushed to local Docker daemon's storage. buildah can also push container images to the remote registry. It is highly recommended to read the documentation to know about more features and capabilities of buildah.
In a future blog, we will share how the CentOS Container Pipeline team managed to build container images on OpenShift using buildah.

February 14, 2019

Videos from FOSDEM Dojo now live

February 14, 2019 03:56 PM
CentOS Blog
Just a quick update - the schedule from the recent CentOS Dojo at FOSDEM has been updated to include the videos from each presentation.
Note: Three of the talks are missing video due to equipment failure.

February 07, 2019

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, February 2019 (#1902)

February 07, 2019 03:57 AM
CentOS Blog
Dear CentOS enthusiast,
Another month into 2019, and we have a lot to tell you about.

Releases and updates

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during January:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during January:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during January:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS.
Several of our SIGs published their quarterly reports this month:
Next month we hope to hear from:
  • Artwork
  • Cloud Instance
  • OpsTools
  • Public CI
  • Virtualization

Events

We started off February with a bang, with our annual CentOS Dojo at FOSDEM.  You can read a summary of that event on the CentOS blog. We will be posting video from the event on the CentOS YouTube channel as soon as possible.
We also had a table at FOSDEM itself. FOSDEM is a gathering of 6000 free/open source software enthusiasts at Brussel's ULB. Topics covered are everything from distributions to licensing to community to storage. Video from almost every session at the event is already available at the event website.
Next month, we expect to have a presence at FOSSAsia in Singapore.
And in April we are planning to hold a Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs, in Oak Ridge Tennessee.
If you would like to host a Dojo, or have a suggestion for where we should have one, please get in touch with the CentOS Promo mailing list.
Other upcoming events are always listed on the events wiki page.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse


We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:
  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month
Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

February 06, 2019

Releases/updates on Feb 1

February 06, 2019 07:05 PM
CentOS Blog
On February 1st (last week) there were a large number of enhancements/updates released by the CentOS community:

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories):

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories):

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories):

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