Hello,

Recent events in the openSUSE community have left the board needing to fill a few seats. Although I have never been one to show deep interest in the board, I believe it is now the right time to step up my participation in the project. With this in mind I presented my candidacy for the openSUSE Board this year.

It is not news that our project is always looking to improve and put our culture closer to the hands of many people looking to make the "Linux switch." Under this premise, I have participated of the openSUSE Artwork team for the past few years and as an openSUSE Linux novice since 2000. New needs and ventures have also taken me to participate in the openSUSE News team as an editor.

Seeing that my participation in the project has become more evident and thereby making openSUSE more evident to users that follow us, the candidacy for the board comes at a time when we need to strengthen our marketing strategies and our overall communication structure not only to the community, but also those looking to use our distribution and are not quite decided yet.

You may be acquainted with the work I have done in the past. Much of our recent promotional artwork for CDs, Posters, Stickers, Website artwork for the openSUSE Summit and openSUSE Conference, and other visual projects has been conceptualized by me based on the ideals that openSUSE has a visual importance that needs expansion.

Editing news articles has also given incredible insight into what openSUSE is able to communicate and inspire about Linux in many people looking to make the jump.

I have also been a speaker in a couple of openSUSE-related events and have tried communicating our ideals and goals.

I believe in openSUSE as a means of visual communication. I believe there are many things that our project can shine about and many more things to discover as a team.

If you are a believer in the future of openSUSE I humbly as for your vote and support.

In 1996 Regurgitator released a song called “Kong Foo Sing“. It starts with the line “Happiness is a Kong Foo Sing”, in reference to a particular brand of fortune cookie. But one night last week at the OpenStack Summit, I couldn’t help but think it would be better stated as “Happiness is a Hong Kong SIM”, because I’ve apparently become thoroughly addicted to my data connection.

I was there with five other SUSE engineers who work on SUSE Cloud (our OpenStack offering); Ralf Haferkamp, Michal Jura, Dirk Müller, Vincent Untz and Bernhard Wiedemann. We also had SUSE crew manning a booth which had one of those skill tester machines filled with plush Geekos. I didn’t manage to get one. Apparently my manual dexterity is less well developed than my hacking skills, because I did make ATC thanks to a handful of openSUSE-related commits to TripleO (apologies for the shameless self-aggrandizement, but this is my blog after all).

Given this was my first design summit, I thought it most sensible to first attend “Design Summit 101“, to get a handle on the format. The summit as a whole is split into general sessions and design summit sessions, the former for everyone, the latter intended for developers to map out what needs to happen for the next release. There’s also vendor booths in the main hall.

Roughly speaking, design sessions get a bunch of people together with a moderator/leader and an etherpad up on a projector, which anyone can edit. Then whatever the topic is, is hashed out over the next forty-odd minutes. It’s actually a really good format. The sessions I was in, anyone who wanted to speak or had something to offer, was heard. Everyone was courteous, and very welcoming of input, and of newcomers. Actually, as I remarked on the last day towards the end of Joshua McKenty’s “Culture, Code, Community and Conway” talk, everyone is terrifyingly happy. And this is not normal, but it’s a good thing.

As I’ve been doing high availability and storage for the past several years, and have also spent time on SUSE porting and scalability work on Crowbar, I split my time largely between HA, storage and deployment sessions.

On the deployment front, I went to:

• HA/Production Configuration, where the pieces of OpenStack that TripleO needs to deploy in a highly available manner were discussed (actually this could have been discussed for a solid week
• Stable Branch Support and Update Futures, about updating images made for TripleO.
• An Evaluation of OpenStack Deployment Frameworks, where two guys from Symantec discussed the evaluation they’d done of Fuel, JuJu/MaaS, Crowbar, Foreman and Rackspace Private Cloud. In short, nothing was perfect, but Crowbar 1.6 performed the best (i.e. met their requirements better than any of the other solutions tested).
• Roundtable: Deploying and Upgrading OpenStack.
• OpenStack’s Bare Metal Provisioning Service, wherein I attained a better understanding of Ironic.
• It Not Just An Unicorn, Updating Our Public Cloud Platform from Folsom to Grizzly – how eNovance manage upgrades. Automate all the things and test, test, test. Binary updates are done by rsyncing prepared trees, but everything can be rolled back and forwards, because everything is in revision control. It sounds like they’ve done a very thorough job in their environment. I’m less sure this technique is applicable in a generic fashion.
• The Road to Live Upgrades. Notably they want to add a live upgrade test as a commit gate.
• Hardware Management Ramdisk. Lots of work to do here for Ironic to deploy ramdisks to do, e.g.: firmware updates, RAID configuration, etc.
• Firmware Updates (followed right on from the previous session).
• Making Ironic Resilient to Failures (what do you do if your TFTP/PXE server goes away?)
• Compass – Yet Another OpenStack Deployment System, from Huawei, to be released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license “soon” (end of November). A layer on top of Chef, but with other configuration tools as pluggable modules. If you squint at it just right, I’d argue it’s not dissimilar to Crowbar, at least from a high level.

On High Availability:

• Practical Lessons from Building a Highly Available OpenStack Private Cloud (Ceph for all storage, HA via four separate Pacemaker clusters. Notably the cluster running compute can scale out by just adding more nodes.
• High Availability Update: Havana and Icehouse, wherein I attempted to look scary sitting the front row wearing my STONITH Deathmatch t-shirt. I hope Florian and Syed will forgive my butchering their talk by summarizing it as: If you’re using MySQL, you want Galera. RabbitMQ still has consistency issues with mirrored queues and there can be only one Neutron L3 agent, so you need Pacemaker for those at least, so using Pacemaker to “HA all the things” is still an eminently reasonable approach (haproxy is great for load balancing, but no good if you have a service that’s fundamentally active/passive). Use Ceph for all your storage.
• Database Clusters as a Service in OpenStack: Integrated, Scalable, Highly Available and Secure. Focused on MySQL/MariaDB/Percona, Galera and variants thereof, which combinations are supported by Rackspace, HP Cloud and Amazon, and various deployment considerations (including replication across data centers).

On Storage:

• Encrypted Block Storage: Technical Walkthrough. This looks pretty neat. Crypto is done on the compute host via dm-crypt, so everything is encrypted in the volume store and even over the wire going to and from the compute host. Still needs work (naturally), notably it currently uses a single static key. Later, it will use Barbican.
• Swift Drive Workloads and Kinetic Open Storage. Sadly I had to skip out of this one early, but Seagate now have an interesting product which is a disk (and some enclosures) which present disks as key/value stores over ethernet, rather than as block devices. The idea here is you remove a whole lot of layers of the storage stack to try to get better performance.
• Real World Usage of GlusterFS + OpenStack. Interesting history of the project, what the pieces are, and how they now provide an “all-in-one” storage solution for OpenStack.
• Ceph: The De Facto Storage Backend for OpenStack. It was inevitable that this would go back-to-back with a GlusterFS presentation. All storage components (Glance, Cinder, object store) unified. Interestingly the
  libvirt_image_type=rbd option lets you directly boot all VMs from Ceph (at least if you’re using KVM). Is it the perfect stack? “Almost” (glance images are still copied around more than they should be, but there’s a patch for this floating around somewhere, also some snapshot integration work is still necessary).
• Sheepdog: Yet Another All-In-One Storage for Openstack. So everyone is doing all-in-one storage for OpenStack now I haven’t spent any time with Sheepdog in the past, so this was interesting. It apparently tries to have minimal assumptions about the underlying kernel and filesystem, yet supports thousands of nodes, is purportedly fast and small (<50MB memory footprint) and consists of only 35K lines of C code.
• Ceph OpenStack Integration Unconference (gathering ideas to improve Ceph integration in OpenStack).

Around all this of course were many interesting discussions, meals and drinks with all sorts of people; my immediate colleagues, my some-time partners in crime, various long-time conference buddies and an assortment of delightful (and occasionally crazy) new acquaintances. If you’ve made it this far and haven’t been to an OpenStack summit yet, try to get to Atlanta in six months or Paris in a year. I don’t know yet whether or not I’ll be there, but I can pretty much guarantee you’ll still have a good time.

Hello fellow geekos, Let's start with a little introduction for those that don't know me. I've been involved in the openSUSE project for more than 3 years by now while being among the top ten contributors to Factory for most of the time. I mainly develop the Python and Go stacks as well as OpenStack. … Continue reading openSUSE Board candidacy

Hello fellow Geekos!

After 10 months serving on the Board, my current tenure on the Board is
due to end this year.

It's been a busy 10 months, during which time I've been involved in
progressing the reform of the Ambassador/Advocate & Local Coordinator
Programmes, monitoring the improvements to the Travel support programme,
countless copyright requests and much more besides, all while
maintaining my contributions to other parts of the project as a regular
Geeko (GNOME & Branding in particular).

With all that said, there is lots more work that remains to be done,
which is why I'm announcing my intention to stand for (re)election to
the openSUSE Board

If you choose to re-elect me, my priority will be to continue to
represent you all, our community of contributors, and to address the
issues of greatest concern to you and our Project.
I hope to encourage further empowerment of both the Board and the wider
Community to take on responsibilities 'traditionally' held only by SUSE
employees. I also wish to improve the working relationship between the
Board and the openSUSE Team.

As you may already know, as of last week I have become a SUSE employee.
As I am working in QA, my 'day job' will continue to have relatively
little to do with openSUSE, but given that openSUSE has been my hobby
and my passion for something like 7 years, I am not intending to let my
new employment change how I serve this community; Though obviously being
surrounded by so many of our contributors in Nuremberg will hopefully
make it easier for me to hear what's of interest to you :)

I hope you trust me with your votes in a few weeks time.
Thanks for all the fun,

Richard

A blog entry detailing how I learned something about administering git repositories and, at the same time, migrated my passwords from kwalletmanager (which I found difficult to back up and keep synchronized between machines), to password-store, a command-line application that optionally works with a git repository.
Read more »

• What we call "the future". You will know more about it soon.
• The openSUSE Development and Release process, that will have openSUSE 13.1 as the main result, coming in a few days (November 19th).
• Community work. Specially around the openSUSE Conference and the news portal.

As you know, RPM (and DEB and ...) package building is a repetitive process and you would want to automate it as much as possible. In the context of the Open Build Service(OBS), source services can help you with exactly that. Over the time, the OBS community has implemented a whole range of source services. … Continue reading OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

Lets start with the happy stuff we have in Gentoo.

Andreas (dilfridge) created the binary package for 4.1.3.2 which means we have latest upstream provided as binary for stable users. He also managed to get Patrick (bonsaikitten) to provide HW where we can build the testing tree based version too. So stay tuned the binary will soon TM arrive for testing tree.

There seem to be some issues with portage lately wrt subslots and tracking the rebuilds so if you have build collisions while emerging this just try to mess with –backtrack option and put there some value bigger than 30.

I spent some time updating the dependencies and prepped the switches for 4.2 release so we should be on good track there. But as always it would be nice to have more people in the team working on individual bumps (it is just copy from one version to another most of the time) but I can’t be everywhere and sometimes I overlook things. So if you are interested just drop by #gentoo-office irc channel and we can get you hooked. Later on the run you can became also developer as this position is suited for contributors who want to get involved more.

Now the other half about openSUSE state

Here goes the sad part. As libreoffice team moved to collabora it left openSUSE without any packager for the suite. Part of the libreoffice team responsibility was also maintaining the hunspell dicitionaries which is even worse as it impacts everybody who uses the hunspell for spellchecking (kde/gnome/…).

So we need people interested in maintaining all the stuff updated and working. Most of the tasks now are quite complex as the packages are written with compatibility for sle10 in mind. We can finally give up on that and start cleanups (which I intend to do during my free time at some point) but I could use help a lot. So if you are interested in libreoffice future on openSUSE and know how to write “bit” complex spec files just drop me a mail or ping me on irc so we can talk about it.

Some sort of plan I have with this:
1) Reduce the repositories used. As I am all alone working on this I will remove all the stable/unstable stuff and provide only :Factory repo which will be built against Factory and supported openSUSE versions (12.2/12.3/13.1). Unstable will be utilized only for testing of beta releases before next minor bump if needed (4.1.0 -> 4.2.0).
2) Cleanup all the stuff in the libreoffice package to have it maintainable with less dificulity (now it takes quite few hours just to bump from 4.1.2 to 4.1.3 which is bugfix release and that is not optiomal).
3) Probably solve the dictionaries situation for good by using only the dictionaries from libreoffice repo. Where we can say to people if they want support they just need to git commit it to libreoffice git repository. Which has nice sideefect of improving spellchecking for english and others.

Aloha fellow Geekos! I was fortunate enough to have been elected to the Board two years ago, and as always when you have fun time flies. As such my current tenure on the Board is due to end this year. As the openSUSE project is something that I value, believe in and enjoy I would like to stand for re-election. I will not present my campaign yet but will do so as of the 18 Nov, but what I will say is this: