Tag: OpenVZ

Summer – finally

Christian 1 Comment

Well it’s mid of July and the weather seems to be my friend. 25°C ain’t that bad. I really liked the weather last week (although everyone at work was bitching about it being tooo warm :P) and would like to keep it (for the rest of the year of course!).

Hrm, for everyone who loved the music within Kill Bill – Volume 1: Tomoyasu Hotei really rocks (playing Battle without Honor or Humanity).

Work is finally getting interesting. The x366 have been delivered, as well as the new Netbay 42U rack and of course the optional Cisco Catalyst 3650. Hopefully my co-worker will let me work on those babies in a short time (I would really like to :))

And now to my Gentoo related work:

I had an interesting conversation with Hendrik yesterday about some of his packages, and I’m taking over some of them …

I bumped sys-cluster/vzctl, hopefully all bugs related to the upstream changes (well I missed a config var in the init-script #138469) are now fixed. Oh yeah, they finally decided to switch to a sane versioning scheme. Thanks Kir and Igor!

Linux VServer stuff is also approaching its final release (even if Herbert is always saying When its done. I’ll prepare the patch tarballs for 2.{0.2,1.1}_rc26 later.

Meh, I nearly forgot to say thank you. Thanks a lot Mr. Bush. They just showed how the local waste disposal company is blocking the road with dumpsters while being protected by ~20 policemen … And only to prevent anybody driving into the city with a car which could endanger Mr. President!

LinuxTag – part 2

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I’m sitting in the S8 to Frankfurt Airport where I’ll switch to the ICE to Stuttgart to visit my cousins and my aunt. Linux Tag was quite amazing, I finally met some of the people behind OpenVZ (Kir and Kirill), saw a bit of Andrew Morton’s Kernel FAQ (Kir told us that) and met some people including Bertl, doener, derjohn, zeng, foo, … of the linux-vserver community. Both workshops were quite interesting and I learned a lot of things about openvz and it’s userland tools and linux-vserver (finally I understood the CPU Tokenbucket system).

Even if I didn’t arrive in time to watch Kir and Kirill’s presentation of openvz and its features completely, I managed to watch Kir demonstrating the live migration between two different nodes. Even if Kirill needed to reboot his system due to a readonly filesystem (it was / that was the whole bugger) I have to admit it really impressed me (since that’s a feature we had to pay 3000€ for VMware ESX and no I don’t want do hear a single word about it). Sadly the OpenVZ stuff isn’t ported yet to SPARC so I’ll keep vServer running on the U1 (Ultra1). I also met Hollow in person, which really was the highlight of all days. He was my mentor when I joined Gentoo and is the person that I’m doing most of my work on Gentoo / Linux vServer / OpenVZ related things. Bertl’s talk nearly took four hours but those four hours were quite informative and interesting. He held a general introduction into virtualization theory (which took him two hours). After a small fifth teen minute break he demonstrated most of the things possible with linux-vserver (including resource limits to kill kill certain memory/cpu hogs).

Demonstration ended at 18:10 and we got back up to the Linux vServer booth were I finally managed to ask Bertl about his patch name versioning scheme. And I finally understood it!

We also stopped by at the SWsoft booth to say goodbye to Kir and Kirill and to talk about the SRPMS but they already had left. We did some group photos of all present at the Linux vServer booth. Afterwards Hollow and I grabbed our backpacks and took of to the station. On the way we had a little discussion about problems and stuff that we recently noticed. First was the /dev/console virtualization effort, since we switched from init-style Gentoo (which we removed from the utils) to plain. The virtualization would show some effect if you’re wanna be able to see what’s happening on the startup phase of a vServer. Second thing was the reintroduction of the fastboot bug (that’s what I call it). The util-vserver package leaves a plain and empty file in the guests root filesystem, which really annoys me. The third thing is the vserver-init.$( mktemp )´ file that is placed in /tmp but isn’t deleted after startup is complete. Another thing we talked about was the vserver stop´ which only waits for the vkill timeout to kick in but isn’t going to stop the vServer by itself.

Birthday

Christian 1 Comment

Today being my Birthday pretty much started my day. Somehow I managed to accept a call at 00:12 (while I was asleep) but I don’t even remember taking it. Somehow my real live is getting better and better (as in finding some friends as I pretty much was a hermit for the last couple of years).

Also I found someone to share my toughts with, someone who understands it, how to really get to me (read it as a very good friend :P)

Gentoo stuff is living on. vserver-sources/linux-vserver is approaching it’s next stable release (hopefully in this week), openvz-sources finally on something newer than 2.6.8.1 (ok, they’re there quite a while) and baselayout-vserver finally working on both openvz and linux-vserver.

And my little experiment also continues (the WRAP experiment). I’m currently trying to get a minimal Gentoo running on that (well sort of). I’m currently trying to get some replacement for/a way to strip down GCC (I really don’t need a compiler on the WRAP, and since the whole GCC takes 79M it’s pretty much a candidate for removal).

solar yesterday mentioned something like this:

Well that would be a pretty nifty feature (and I already tried my luck and wisdom *cough*), but hopefully we’ll se something like that pretty soon 🙂

It’s almost a year since I joined Gentoo and I have to admit that it was a pretty good time so far (well except some random things, like me screwing some releases).