The great thing about having a 3D printer and open source CAD software is the ability to make accomplishing projects easier. In short, I had some electrical conduit to run and I wanted to mount it along a steel structural I-beam in CubicleLabs. I found some clamps that would work but they were too expensive […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week we released only 5 snapshots, but one was hefty in size and we needed the extra time for the mirrors to settle again and get the bandwidth back under control. The large snapshot was due to the change in the default compiler: Tumbleweed has been rebuilt entirely using GCC 13. The released snapshots were numbered 0316, 0317, 0318, 0319, and 0321.

The most relevant changes in these snapshots were:

• Linux kernel 6.2.6
• transmission 4.0.2
• KDE Plasma 5.27.3
• systemd 253.1
• GCC 13 is now used as the default compiler

As we needed to slow down check-ins, naturally the staging projects are well filled up now. You can expect these changes to reach you soon:

• GNOME 44
• Linux kernel 6.2.8
• cmake 3.26.0
• cURL 8.0.1
• LibreOffice 7.5.2
• Samba 4.18.0
• LLVM 16
• openSSL 3.1.0

One extra reminder for i586 users now: next week marks the end of i586 packages in the regular openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories. Should you still run Tumbleweed on such an old machine, you can keep on doing so using the separate port (repositories at http://download.opensuse.org/ports/i586/tumbleweed/repo/).

We – that is to say the storage team at SUSE – have a tool we’ve been using for the past few years to help with development and testing of Ceph on SUSE Linux. It’s called sesdev because it was created largely for SES (SUSE Enterprise Storage) development. It’s essentially a wrapper around vagrant and libvirt that will spin up clusters of VMs running openSUSE or SLES, then deploy Ceph on them. You would never use such clusters in production, but it’s really nice to be able to easily spin up a cluster for testing purposes that behaves something like a real cluster would, then throw it away when you’re done.

I’ve recently been trying to spend more time playing with Kubernetes, which means I wanted to be able to spin up clusters of VMs running openSUSE or SLES, then deploy Kubernetes on them, then throw the clusters away when I was done, or when I broke something horribly and wanted to start over. Yes, I know there’s a bunch of other tools for doing toy Kubernetes deployments (minikube comes to mind), but given I already had sesdev and was pretty familiar with it, I thought it’d be worthwhile seeing if I could teach it to deploy k3s, a particularly lightweight version of Kubernetes. Turns out that wasn’t too difficult, so now I can do this:

> sesdev create k3s
=== Creating deployment "k3s" with the following configuration === 
Deployment-wide parameters (applicable to all VMs in deployment):
deployment ID:    k3s
number of VMs:    5
version:          k3s
OS:               tumbleweed
public network:   10.20.190.0/24 
Proceed with deployment (y=yes, n=no, d=show details) ? [y]: y
=== Running shell command ===
vagrant up --no-destroy-on-error --provision
Bringing machine 'master' up with 'libvirt' provider...
Bringing machine 'node1' up with 'libvirt' provider...
Bringing machine 'node2' up with 'libvirt' provider...
Bringing machine 'node3' up with 'libvirt' provider...
Bringing machine 'node4' up with 'libvirt' provider...

[...
  wait a few minutes
  (there's lots more log information output here in real life)
...]

=== Deployment Finished ===
 You can login into the cluster with:
 $ sesdev ssh k3s

…and then I can do this:

> sesdev ssh k3s
Last login: Fri Mar 24 11:50:15 CET 2023 from 10.20.190.204 on ssh
Have a lot of fun…

master:~ # kubectl get nodes
NAME     STATUS   ROLES                  AGE     VERSION
master   Ready    control-plane,master   5m16s   v1.25.7+k3s1
node2    Ready                     2m17s   v1.25.7+k3s1
node1    Ready                     2m15s   v1.25.7+k3s1
node3    Ready                     2m16s   v1.25.7+k3s1
node4    Ready                     2m16s   v1.25.7+k3s1 

master:~ # kubectl get pods -A
NAMESPACE     NAME                                      READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system   local-path-provisioner-79f67d76f8-rpj4d   1/1     Running     0          5m9s
kube-system   metrics-server-5f9f776df5-rsqhb           1/1     Running     0          5m9s
kube-system   coredns-597584b69b-xh4p7                  1/1     Running     0          5m9s
kube-system   helm-install-traefik-crd-zz2ld            0/1     Completed   0          5m10s
kube-system   helm-install-traefik-ckdsr                0/1     Completed   1          5m10s
kube-system   svclb-traefik-952808e4-5txd7              2/2     Running     0          3m55s
kube-system   traefik-66c46d954f-pgnv8                  1/1     Running     0          3m55s
kube-system   svclb-traefik-952808e4-dkkp6              2/2     Running     0          2m25s
kube-system   svclb-traefik-952808e4-7wk6l              2/2     Running     0          2m13s
kube-system   svclb-traefik-952808e4-chmbx              2/2     Running     0          2m14s
kube-system   svclb-traefik-952808e4-k7hrw              2/2     Running     0          2m14s

…and then I can make a mess with kubectl apply, helm, etc.

One thing that sesdev knows how to do is deploy VMs with extra virtual disks. This functionality is there for Ceph deployments, but there’s no reason we can’t turn it on when deploying k3s:

> sesdev create k3s --num-disks=2
> sesdev ssh k3s
master:~ # for node in \
    $(kubectl get nodes -o 'jsonpath={.items[*].metadata.name}') ;
    do echo $node ; ssh $node cat /proc/partitions ; done
master
major minor  #blocks  name
 253        0   44040192 vda
 253        1       2048 vda1
 253        2      20480 vda2
 253        3   44016623 vda3
node3
major minor  #blocks  name
 253        0   44040192 vda
 253        1       2048 vda1
 253        2      20480 vda2
 253        3   44016623 vda3
 253       16    8388608 vdb
 253       32    8388608 vdc
node2
 major minor  #blocks  name
 253        0   44040192 vda
 253        1       2048 vda1
 253        2      20480 vda2
 253        3   44016623 vda3
 253       16    8388608 vdb
 253       32    8388608 vdc
node4
 major minor  #blocks  name
 253        0   44040192 vda
 253        1       2048 vda1
 253        2      20480 vda2
 253        3   44016623 vda3
 253       16    8388608 vdb
 253       32    8388608 vdc
node1
 major minor  #blocks  name
 253        0   44040192 vda
 253        1       2048 vda1
 253        2      20480 vda2
 253        3   44016623 vda3
 253       16    8388608 vdb
 253       32    8388608 vdc

As you can see this gives all the worker nodes an extra two 8GB virtual disks. I suspect this may make sesdev an interesting tool for testing other Kubernetes based storage systems such as Longhorn, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Whenever there is an Open Mic Night, there are two things that are likely to happen. One: the StrawPoll that Aris puts together will end up dominating a large portion of the two hours we get together; and two: the conversation will weave around so many different trails we have to pause and recount how […]

Rolling-release distribution openSUSE Tumbleweed had a large number of security patches, bug fixes, and new features in snapshots released this week.

Users who did a zypper dup had a full distribution rebuild with GNU Compiler Collection 13, which is the distro’s new default compiler.

This rebuild 20230319 snapshot provided a GCC 13.0.1+git update that rebased a patch and enables a mutual exclusion (mutex) link. An update of flatpak 1.14.4 updated translations and eliminated two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures; CVE-2023-28101 and CVE-2023-28100, which was specific to virtual consoles and users were recommended to use a graphical user interface like GNOME Software rather than graphical terminal emulator such as xterm , gnome-terminal or Konsole. The C++ library for Single Instruction, Multiple Data highway 1.0.4 provides faster KV128 sorting. The package also updated RISC-V Vector Extension Intrinsics for the 1.0-draft. Other packages to update was libstorage-ng 4.5.86 along with several libqt5 packages.

The 20230318 snapshot updated just two packages. The fcitx5-gtk package updated to version 5.0.22. This gtk-im-module and glib-based dbus client library implements notify-focus-out signal and changes GtkIMContext.reset to always commit the preedit state. The other package to update was a Library for creating MusicBrainz DiscIDs, which is a fantastic open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. The libdiscid 0.6.4 package fixes compiler errors and requires CMake 2.8.12 as a minimum version.

Snapshot 20230317 updates DNS protocol bind 9.18.13. The update provides several new features like increasing the responsiveness of named Response Policy Zone (RPZ) updates that are applied after an RPZ zone is successfully transferred. KDE enthusiasts can be happy with the bug fixes released in the Plasma 5.27.3 update. A few of the highlighted fixes were the addition of emoji picker to mappings, the remove of duplicate items when loading from history and PowerDevil sought to make some changes in order to not waste precious energy. An update of gtk4 4.10.1 brought a plethora of changes. Besides dropping a patch that was fixed upstream, the new version fixed a memory leak, some scrolling problems and improved search performance for the cross-platform widget toolkit. An update of systemd to version 253.1 added a few patches, which one is a [temporary workaround until LVM boot failure is fixed in dracut. Several other packages were update in the snapshot including pipewire 0.3.67, icewm 3.3.2, and many qt6 packages.

The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Boot Manager had a major version update in snapshot 20230316, but it wasn’t the only one. There were two other major versions in the snapshot. The efibootmgr 18 restored an activation error message and fixed help messages. The package also added an option for insertion location of new entries and fixed the simple run example. Another major version update was for EFE variables in the efivar 38 update. This package fiedx parsing for nvme-subsystem devices, added some new tooling and properly checks mmap return errors. And yet there was one more major version update with the free BitTorrent client transmission updating for version 4.0.2. The new version takes care of some potential crashes and fixes the display of IPv6 tracker URLs. The Web client was rewritten and now supports mobile use. The Linux Kernel was the only update in the snapshot that wasn’t a major version update. The 6.2.6 kernel-source update partial reverted some wifi configurations and removed some Realtek wireless drivers.

Thanks to the openSUSE Build Service infrastructure, tons of free software is packaged by third part users and made available to every openSUSE user.

One of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng is Elasticsearch (and OpenSearch, Zinc, Humio, etc.). The 12th part of my syslog-ng #tutorial shows you how to send log messages to Elasticsearch.

You can watch the video on YouTube:

and the complete playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoBNbOHNb0i5Pags2JY6-6wH2noLaSiTb

Or you can read the rest the tutorial as a blog at: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-101-part-12-elasticsearch-and-opensearch-zinc-humio-etc

You might have been already using our new openAPI Documentation. We now want to let you know we added some more documentation about package endpoints and we added the new section about file endpoints. You can check them out below! Sources - Packages Sources - Files After kicking off the API documentation remake in January 2021, we’ve continued with the Build and Workers endpoints in April 2021, we followed with Sources Projects and Search endpoints...

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week, I had the sad duty to discard one snapshot due to a bug that snuck through staging and was only identified later in the full product test suite (systemd 253, restarting some services failed weirdly). But as we know from the past, users prefer no snapshot as opposed to one that breaks their system in weird ways. And despite that, 6 snapshots have been delivered during this week (0309 … 0313 & 0315)

The most relevant changes in these snapshots are:

• Linux kernel 6.2.2 (lockdown patches disabled) & 6.2.4
• NetworkManager 1.42.4
• Apache 2.4.56
• LibreOffice 7.5.1.2
• KDE Frameworks 5.104.0
• GStreamer 1.22.1
• Mesa: patch to address multiple crashes seen in gnome-shell since Mesa 23.0
• git 2.40.0

These updates are currently in the queue and are being tested for inclusion in the upcoming snapshots:

• Linux kernel 6.2.6
• systemd 253.1
• Transmission 4.0.2
• KDE Plasma 5.27.3
• GCC 13 as the default compiler
• openSSL 3.1.0

For anyone that has known anything about “CubicleNate” for any period of time will know that I am a huge fan of all things Commodore 64. Maybe not everything but most things, I absolutely am. I am also a fan of open source and the communities that have developed around it. When you combine open […]