OpenStack Logo

Last week I wrote a little bit about OpenStack, what it is good for and that I’ve been working on appliance that you can test. I mentioned appliance to make it easier for people to test OpenStack and play with that. Any feedback is of course appreciated. Since then appliance got updated, because something others have been working on. Although there was Xmass and most of us has other things to worry about enjoy, there has been some progress in other parts of our OpenStack Milestone.
While I was fighting to get OpenStack appliance working, Bernhard Wiedemann was working on other way how to make it more convenient for you to try OpenStack on openSUSE. He wrote a script, that makes the whole OpenStack demo setup much easier. So if you don’t want to use appliance and instead would prefer to just get OpenStack working on your existing setup, you can do it pretty easily. Everything is documented on the wiki. But as you are already reading this, I’ll make it even easier for you and will putt a quick how to here as well.
What do you need? You need some packages, right? First of all you need to add repository with the last stable release. This repository contains fixes, patterns and much more as you’ll see later. You can do it by typing:

Even though I prefer to use instant messaging and SMS, sometimes it’s easier to make a phone call. Especially my parents and grand parents prefer calls over IM (let’s say that SMS is a form of IM). So how do you call them? There are several ways. Some of them are obviously wrong like Skype. We all do hate Skype, right? Closed source binary doing who knows what, using proprietary closed obscured crypted protocol preventing you from using alternative clients and restrictive long license agreement. And of course long history of messy behavior on the network and being nightmare for network administrators. Luckily there is a great alternative – SIP. Well specified, standardized protocol, many different clients to choose from and well defined behavior. Your network administrator might even consider setting up QoS in your favor. So the SIP is the way to go, right? Even Google thinks so and one of the big additions to Android 2.3 was SIP.

OpenStack Logo

Some of you might know, that the latest thing we Boosters were working on was promoting OpenStack on openSUSE. What is OpenStack? OpenStack is really cool, let’s write something more about it and then I’ll continue with what I wanted to report 😉

OpenStack

Imagine you are running data center. You’ve got tenths or several hundreds of computers (thousands scares me, let’s end with few hundreds top). We geeks have this sort of dreams, right? Everybody wants to be a rock star, fly to the moon and have a private data center or two, right? Now let’s say, that you want to run some services in your data center. How do you decide where to put them? Where to keep your data? Here comes OpenStack to help you create your own virtualization cloud!!!
Let’s get to the boring exciting details! OpenStack consist from several components. All these components does just what they are supposed to. If you put them together, you will get your own virtualization cloud. But you can leave some of them out or even use just part of the cloud infrastructure. Let’s take a look at some of them.

As I wrote previously, there is The Clean IT Project supported by European Union. Their focus is to create some recommendation on fighting unlawful usage of the Internet. Pretty impossible to do so while keeping our freedom, isn’t it? Recently The Clean IT Project published the draft of what they have been working on. You can download it on the their website. It is unfortunately in proprietary closed format, but we all know how to handle these… What I want to do now is to do a little review of their draft. I’ll send the feedback back to the group so they can address the issues 😉

I wish you happy New Year!!!

Do you remember my little script that makes pasting from command line easier? I wrote it to simplify sharing program outputs, logs and whatever you want with your friends on the Internet. It takes a file or output of the program and put it on susepaste.org. And it will return you a link and automatically copy it to your clipboard. You can also predefine your nickname, how long it should last and even give it a key to use openSUSE Paste as logged in you. I think it is pretty useful and I’m using it myself quite often. So I’m happy to announce, that this little utility recently landed in openSUSE:Factory. What does it mean for you? Positive thing is, that it is going to be part of openSUSE 12.2! No extra repositories needed. Not so positive thing about it is, that it had to be dropped from Contrib repository and now it is available in devel:tools repository. But I know that not everybody wants to add such a big repository just because of this one little package. So I also created home:-miska-:Release:susepaste repository in which is only susepaste script. Not only that there is only this package and nothing else, but this package is there in latest version for many various openSUSE versions and even for some other distributions (if you happen to be maintaining various servers 😉 ). So enjoy 😉

Christmas are coming, most of us will be at home, spending some time with their families. Everybody looks forward to it. Everybody is stressed at least a month before to get everything ready and then you are at home, with your family and it’s great. For few days. Then, let’s say it starts to be too much of quality time spent together. Luckily, there are Christmas presents to help you. Something you can play with. But if you run out of them and you are interested in MySQL, I’ve got two new packages for you in server:database repository. And as we are speaking about having some fun, these two updates are the latest development versions of two most widely used MySQL variants (at least according to my little survey). You can get MariaDB 5.3.3 which is currently in rc state or MySQL 5.6.4 which is also in development state. I tried both and both works (haven’t lost any data during migration), but I run into some troubles with switching from MariaDB to MySQL. So my blog is currently running MariaDB 5.3.3 but I will migrate it to MySQL 5.6.4 as soon as I resolve the migration problems. What’s new and why should you be interested in trying new versions? Let’s see…

NSA poster by David Westerfield

Recently, thanks to SOIT chairman Marek Mahut I heard about Clean IT Project. This project is supported by European Union and if you look at their site, the first thing you’ll see is one very disturbing paragraph. Paragraph that speaks about the need to fight terrorism and terrorist groups on Internet as they can misuse it to promote their activities, synchronize their actions and do some other evil deeds. What’s disturbing about that? Well, we all know how terrorists are used nowadays. Usually when somebody mentions terrorism, it is because he needs an excuse to get more power, limit our freedom or spend a lot of money on some meaningless project. And from the first paragraph it really looks like attempt for massive Internet censorship, restrictions and repressions. But after reading through the web, it gets a little bit better. Looks like the whole project is about discussion between governments and Internet providers about what they can do and what is possible. Discussions are good, right? And no legal output, just the guide lines and best practices. So it looks quite harmless now, doesn’t it? But there were still several things bothering me… As there was a contact e-mail provided, I wrote a short e-mail with few questions. Yesterday I got an answer so I want to share it with the public. You can read whole e-mail with two minor alterations. I changed formating a little bit (just white spaces and line breaks to make it more readable) and I left out e-mail address (because I don’t like spammers). If you don’t want to read the whole story, I will just summarize…

You all know that openSUSE is getting it’s ARM port, right? That many people is working on it hard every day. And there is big progress going on. Actually because of this great progress, results get published not as often (as Factory is changing all the time, obs doesn’t keep up with binary publishing). So if you want update your device, you are eagerly checking obs and watching number of packages being build at the moment dropping and dropping and where it is almost done and almost ready to be published, somebody fixes gcc and everything starts again 😀 But if you are patient, packages will get published eventually. And then you can be happy and play around. And so do I 😀 I have my ASUS Transformer, which is a great device and since it got openSUSE chroot, it is better then ever! So I wanted to share my excitement 😉 On 12.1 launch party I had a talk about openSUSE on ARM and I showed zypper running on ARM, today I’m going to show you YaST 😉 Reminds you of something? Yes, I published few photos of YaST on ARM in 2010 as well. But this time, it looks like openSUSE ARM port is going to live long and prosper!

As you may know, Google Code in is in progress. It is a great opportunity for high school students to participate in open source and compete in contributing to the projects. And I happened to be one of the mentors with few tasks contributing to our openSUSE Paste. I already mentioned one that was completed some time ago, today I’m going to write about two more!!!
Let’s start with non-technical stuff. As a result of one task openSUSE Paste got itself a logo! Actually several logos. You can get all variants from git. All were designed by Prajwala Parameshwa. But I admit, that I complained and kind of influenced the direction, so if you don’t like them, it’s my fault. If you like them, all glory to the artist who made them 😉 Why is there so many variants? There are three color variations – grey (just an ordinary paper), green (we are green distribution after all) and yellow (as sticky notes are). And for each color there is variant with/without border and with/without Geeko stamp on it. So we can choose different logo for every occasion 😉
Now let’s go to the technical stuff. You know that there are stupid spammers who are interested in spamming our beloved pastebin? And from time to time I go through the database and clean it up. Sometimes people ask me to. So I decided that it would be great, if I can just give some rights around to the people and create a group of moderators that can delete any paste that is clearly a spam or otherwise doesn’t belong to the pastebin. So I wrote a task about that and the same student that implemented the possibility to use use GET presets finished this task and made it possible for people from moderators group (currently that’s just me) to delete any post directly from the web. So if I know you and trust you and if you want to be moderator, ask for rights (having OpenID that works with openSUSE Paste is required) 😉