Recently, I have realized a major difference in how customer support is done on Ubuntu.

As you know, Canonical provides official customer support for Ubuntu both on server and desktop. This is the work I do : provice customer with the best level of support on the Ubuntu distribution.  This is also what I was doing on my previous job, but for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server distributions.

The major difference that I recently realized is that, unlike my previous work with RHEL & SLES, the result of my work is now available to the whole Ubuntu community, not just to the customers that may for our support.

Here is an example. Recently one of our customer identified a bug with vm-builder in a very specific case.  The work that I did on this bug resulted in a patch that I submitted to the developers who accepted its inclusion in the code. In my previous life, this fix would have been made available only to customers paying a subscription to the vendors through their official update or service pack services.

With Ubuntu, through Launchpad and the regular community activity, this fix will become available to the whole community through the standard -updates channel of our public archives.

This is true for the vast majority of the fixes that are provided to our customers. As a matter of fact, the public archives are almost the only channel that we have to provide fixes to our customers, hence making them available to the whole Ubuntu community at the same time.  This is different behavior and something that makes me a bit prouder of the work I’m doing.

The meeting minutes with full irc log can also be found here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
  • No action items
• Precise Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Meeting Actions

• rbasak to try precise on pandaboard
• hallyn to swap rbasak for NCommander in arm agenda section

Review Actions from previous meeting

There were no action items from the previous meeting.

Precise Development

Daviey pointed to http://status.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/ubuntu-server/release-bugs.html and http://status.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/ubuntu-server/triage-report.html need some love. rbasak agreed to take bug 906735 (“package installation should create /var/log/puppet”), and SpamapS thought bug 898340 (“mysql clients statically link libmysqlclient in”) should be on the release radar.

adam_g completed charms for openstack, and SpamapS will review.

jamespage is off the stable rotation now, and will have time to work on the CI lab.

Daviey asked that everyone look for good bug targets for next week.

Ubuntu Server Team Events

Next week, some of the server team will be sprinting in Budapest, and Fosdem

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

jamespage put a few new iso install tests live, so we now have daily testing. patrickmw has put up a new precise dashboard reporting daily testing results at https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com. Precise ec2 images are broken due to a kernel oops (bug 911204). smb believes xen guests were broken by some upstream rtc changes. Openstack automated testing should be picking up in the next few days.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Bug 902951 (“CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK shouldnt be a module”) was brought up, but appears to be stalled.

Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)

Daviey is concerned that ARM kernel bugs will be found late in the cycle. rbasak therefore agreed to try precise on a pandaboard.

Open Discussion

rbasak asked about bug 858878 (“lack of csrf protection in cobbler-web”). RoAkSoAx says it’s a security issue and therefore goes through a different process than SRUs, so he can’t do any more to kick it. adam_g asked zul to bake the next openstack snapshot in a ppa for a few days before the friday release.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, Jan 17 at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

The meeting minutes with full irc log can also be found here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
  • No action items
• Precise Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Meeting Actions

• rbasak to try precise on pandaboard
• hallyn to swap rbasak for NCommander in arm agenda section

Review Actions from previous meeting

There were no action items from the previous meeting.

Precise Development

Daviey pointed to http://status.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/ubuntu-server/release-bugs.html and http://status.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/ubuntu-server/triage-report.html need some love. rbasak agreed to take bug 906735 (“package installation should create /var/log/puppet”), and SpamapS thought bug 898340 (“mysql clients statically link libmysqlclient in”) should be on the release radar.

adam_g completed charms for openstack, and SpamapS will review.

jamespage is off the stable rotation now, and will have time to work on the CI lab.

Daviey asked that everyone look for good bug targets for next week.

Ubuntu Server Team Events

Next week, some of the server team will be sprinting in Budapest, and Fosdem

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

jamespage put a few new iso install tests live, so we now have daily testing. patrickmw has put up a new precise dashboard reporting daily testing results at https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com. Precise ec2 images are broken due to a kernel oops (bug 911204). smb believes xen guests were broken by some upstream rtc changes. Openstack automated testing should be picking up in the next few days.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Bug 902951 (“CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK shouldnt be a module”) was brought up, but appears to be stalled.

Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)

Daviey is concerned that ARM kernel bugs will be found late in the cycle. rbasak therefore agreed to try precise on a pandaboard.

Open Discussion

rbasak asked about bug 858878 (“lack of csrf protection in cobbler-web”). RoAkSoAx says it’s a security issue and therefore goes through a different process than SRUs, so he can’t do any more to kick it. adam_g asked zul to bake the next openstack snapshot in a ppa for a few days before the friday release.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, Jan 17 at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

At the moment we are working on providing support for proxy on Ubuntu One. In order to test this correctly I have been setting up a LAN in my office so that I can test as many scenarion as possible. On of those scenarios is the one in which the auth if the proxy uses Active Directory.

Because I use bind9 to set one of my boxed for the DNS I had to dig out how to configure it to work with AD. In order to do that I did the following:

1. Edited named.conf.local to add a subdomain for the AD machine:

   zone "ad.example.com" {
           type master;
           file "/etc/bind/db.ad.example.com";
           allow-update { 192.168.1.103; };
   };
   

2. Configured the subzone to work with AD.

   ; BIND data file for local loopback interface
   ;
   $TTL    604800
   @       IN      SOA     ad.example.com. root.ad.example.com. (
                                 2         ; Serial
                            604800         ; Refresh
                             86400         ; Retry
                           2419200         ; Expire
                            604800 )       ; Negative Cache TTL
   ;
   @       IN      NS      ad.marvel.
   @       IN      A       127.0.0.1
   @       IN      AAAA    ::1
   ;
   ; AD horrible domains
   ;
   dc1.ad.example.com.    A       192.168.1.103
   _ldap._tcp.ad.example.com.     SRV     0 0 389  dc1.ad.example.com.
   _kerberos._tcp.ad.example.com.    SRV     0 0 88   dc1.ad.example.com.
   _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.ad.example.com.   SRV     0 0 389  dc1.ad.example.com.
   _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.ad.example.com.    SRV     0 0 88   dc1.ad.example.com.
   gc._msdcs.ad.example.com.      SRV     0 0 3268 dc1.ad.example.com.
   

   Note:Is important to remember that the computer name of the server that has the AD role is dc1, if we used a diff name we have to change the configuration accordingly.

3. Restart the bind9 service:

   sudo /etc/init.d/bind9 restart
   

4. Install the AD server and specify that you DO NOT want to set that server as a DNS server too.
5. Set the AD server to use your Ubuntu with your bind9 as the DNS server.

There are lots of things missing if you wanted to use this a set up for a corporate network, but it does the trick in my LAN since I do not have AD duplication or other fancy things. Maybe is useful for you home, who knows..

The meeting minutes with full irc log can also be found here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
  • hggdh and SpamapS to discuss SRU verification work for bug 750371 at next meeting or before
  • jamespage to look at bug 655533
  • Daviey, smoser, hallyn to follow up on bug 801494
  • Deadline for ODS is today
  • smoser, utlemming and smb to follow up on Bug 854050
  • utlemming to figure out qemu image situation
• Oneiric Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Much of the team was away at ODS. Oneiric development is currently focused on final critical bug fixing.

The question was asked whether keystone would be shipped in Oneiric. There were concerns about its readyness. Daviey will follow up with ttx etc for guidance.

Meeting Actions

• hggdh and SpamapS to discuss SRU verification work for bug 750371 at next meeting or before (hggdh to test)
• jamespage to follow up with jhunt on udev/lvm bugs including 801494
• smoser, utlemming and smb to follow up on Bug 854050
• utlemming to figure out qemu image situation (carry-over)
• Daviey to talk to ttx and keystone honcho for guidance about oneiric package

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 11th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

The meeting minutes with full irc log can also be found here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
  • hggdh and SpamapS to discuss SRU verification work for bug 750371 at next meeting or before
  • jamespage to look at bug 655533
  • Daviey, smoser, hallyn to follow up on bug 801494
  • Deadline for ODS is today
  • smoser, utlemming and smb to follow up on Bug 854050
  • utlemming to figure out qemu image situation
• Oneiric Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Much of the team was away at ODS. Oneiric development is currently focused on final critical bug fixing.

The question was asked whether keystone would be shipped in Oneiric. There were concerns about its readyness. Daviey will follow up with ttx etc for guidance.

Meeting Actions

• hggdh and SpamapS to discuss SRU verification work for bug 750371 at next meeting or before (hggdh to test)
• jamespage to follow up with jhunt on udev/lvm bugs including 801494
• smoser, utlemming and smb to follow up on Bug 854050
• utlemming to figure out qemu image situation (carry-over)
• Daviey to talk to ttx and keystone honcho for guidance about oneiric package

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, October 11th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

While testing Oneiric on a separate disk, I wanted to get some files off my laptop’s hard drive which is hosting my normal Natty’s install.  Keeping with a previous setup, I had installed my laptop with a fully encrypted hard disk, using the alternate CD, so I needed a procedure to do this manually.

Previously, I had tested booting the Natty LiveCD and, to my enlightened surprise, the Livce CD did see the encrypted HD and proceeded to ask for the passphrase in order to mount it.  But this time, I’m not running off the LiveCD, but from a complete install which is on a separate hard drive.  Since it took me a while to locate the proper procedure, I thought that I would help google a bit so it is not so deep in the pagerank for others next time.  But first, thanks to UbuntuGeek’s article Rescue and encrypted LUKS LVM volume for providing the solution.

Since creating an encrypted Home directory is easily achieved with standard installation methods, there are many references to how to achieve it for encrypted private directory. Dustin Kirkland’s blog is a very good source of information on those topics. But dealing with an encrypted partition requires a different approach. Here it is (at least for an encrypted partition done using the Ubuntu alternate DVD) :

First of all, you need to make sure that lvm2 and cryptsetup packages are installed. If not, go ahead and install them

 # sudo aptitude install cryptsetup lvm2

Then verify if the dm-crypt module is loaded and load it if it is not

 # sudo modprobe dm-crypt

Once this is done, open  the LUKS partition (using your own encrypted partition name) :

 # sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 crypt1

You should have to provide the passphrase that is used to unlock your crypted partition here.

Once this is done, you must scan for the LVM volume groups :

 # sudo vgscan –mknodes
 # sudo vgchange -ay

There, you should get the name of the volume group that will be needed to mount the encrypted partition (which happens to be configured as an LVM volume). You can now procede to mount your partition (changing {volumegroup} with the name that you collected in the previous command ) :

# sudo mount /dev/{volumegroup}/root /mnt

Your encrypted data should now be available in the /mnt directory

Meeting notes with full irc logs can also be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/Server/20110816.

Agenda

Review ACTION points from previous meeting
sommer and j1mc to look at doc presentation (continued x 3)
smb and utlemming to look at Bug #791850
Daviey and adam_g to address Bug #791850
Oneiric Development
Ubuntu Server Team Events

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
Open Discussion
Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

As Somer has sadly announced he does not have sufficient time to continue his excellent work on the docs, kim0 is going to help us by working to create a new community around documentation.

Regarding oneiric images not booting on hvm instances, smb had a test image fixing that problem.

Oneiric Development

With everyone sprinting the previous week, our bug list had grown again. Both the triage report and server release bug lists needed work. Daviey said that feature freeze exceptions need to be raised for every feature not yet landed.

Ubuntu Server Team Events

lynxman and company are sprinting next week for openstack and orchestra. Linuxcon is this week.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

smb was wondering whether the rename of xvd to sd patch should be reverted on maverick as well. smoser was not comfortable with that, they will discuss further.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

hggdh asked, (1) “are there any new tests we should run on the ISO tracker?” and (2) “what is the status of openstack & companions?”. Daviey said we need more tests, and hopefully Jamespage will be able to help with that soon. Jamespage started a list of openstack testing at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/Oneiric/OpenStackTestPlan.

Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

Daviey asked anyone in the community interested in helping to make Ubuntu server rock even more to ping him.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, August 23d at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Meeting notes with full irc logs can also be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/Server/20110816.

Agenda

Review ACTION points from previous meeting
sommer and j1mc to look at doc presentation (continued x 3)
smb and utlemming to look at Bug #791850
Daviey and adam_g to address Bug #791850
Oneiric Development
Ubuntu Server Team Events

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Weekly Updates & Questions regarding Ubuntu ARM Server (NCommander)

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
Open Discussion
Announce next meeting date and time

Minutes

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

As Somer has sadly announced he does not have sufficient time to continue his excellent work on the docs, kim0 is going to help us by working to create a new community around documentation.

Regarding oneiric images not booting on hvm instances, smb had a test image fixing that problem.

Oneiric Development

With everyone sprinting the previous week, our bug list had grown again. Both the triage report and server release bug lists needed work. Daviey said that feature freeze exceptions need to be raised for every feature not yet landed.

Ubuntu Server Team Events

lynxman and company are sprinting next week for openstack and orchestra. Linuxcon is this week.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

smb was wondering whether the rename of xvd to sd patch should be reverted on maverick as well. smoser was not comfortable with that, they will discuss further.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

hggdh asked, (1) “are there any new tests we should run on the ISO tracker?” and (2) “what is the status of openstack & companions?”. Daviey said we need more tests, and hopefully Jamespage will be able to help with that soon. Jamespage started a list of openstack testing at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/Oneiric/OpenStackTestPlan.

Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

Daviey asked anyone in the community interested in helping to make Ubuntu server rock even more to ping him.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, August 23d at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Here are the minutes of the server team meeting. They can also be found online with the irc log here.

A large portion of the team was out, recovering from last week’s terrific sprint. Alpha2 is out this week, and Daviey asks that we all give it a try and report bugs. Handling our incoming bug count is a priority but we also need to focus on feature development. Ping Daviey if you are unclear on what should be your priorities.

The team welcomed new members m_3, utlemming and Ursinha, then adjourned.

Here are the minutes of the server team meeting. They can also be found online with the irc log here.

A large portion of the team was out, recovering from last week’s terrific sprint. Alpha2 is out this week, and Daviey asks that we all give it a try and report bugs. Handling our incoming bug count is a priority but we also need to focus on feature development. Ping Daviey if you are unclear on what should be your priorities.

The team welcomed new members m_3, utlemming and Ursinha, then adjourned.

Last week saw the culmination of one of the UK’s most popular TV shows – Britain’s Got Talent. The way in which this show over five series has captured the attention of the British public is quite incredible, with the majority of popular media outlets dedicating significant space to the contestants, the judges, rumours about the format and speculation about who would win.

Such coverage and excitement means that Britain’s Got Talent drives audience and voter engagement to levels that politicians must dream about. Of course there are many ways that the show makes sure it gets our attention, not least of which is having hours of live coverage on prime time television, but, the talented team behind the show are also using many techniques to encourage deeper engagement for a modern audience.

Take for example the Buzz Off game. This is a game with which viewers can play along while watching the show to ‘buzz’ the acts that they don’t like using a mobile or web-based application. The buzzes are stored with a running total kept and shown per act on the website, so that the audience goes from being an passive viewer to an active participant in the show. The Buzz Off game is developed by Livetalkback for the Britain’s Got Talent Team and recently Malcolm Box, CTO of Livetalkback explained to a group of London big data enthusiasts some of the challenges in building and designing an application that is required to scale to almost Facebook like proportions for a short period of time. The full presentation is below, but for convenience some of the key points are:

• The volume of traffic being handled by the Buzz application during a two hour live show is equivalent to 130 billion requests per month – excluding Google, this would put the application as approximately the 2nd largest website in the world behind Facebook.
• To manage this scale, the application is based on Ubuntu Server, MySQL and Cassandra all hosted in the Amazon Public Cloud
• The service uses hundreds of instances that must be brought online very quickly as additional capacity is required and then released as the load declines after the show.

Malcolm and the team at Livetalkback have done an incredible job to put this together in a short space of time and have it work reliably throughout this year’s programme. A cloud-based approach made perfect sense for an application with such specific scaling requirements, and it was vital that the application scaled not only technically but financially as well. This is where Ubuntu on Amazon really proved its worth – customers pay for the resources they use and there are no license fees or royalties to worry about when bringing up new instances. It is the type of efficient driving of engagement that once again Government departments must be in awe of.

Which brings us onto the Cabinet Office. The UK Government is looking for ways to provide cost effective online systems that drive audience engagement. Recently there have been signs that there has been progress  through the Alpha.gov.uk project led by Martha Lane Fox. Alpha.gov.uk is a prototype site that demonstrates how digital services could be delivered more effectively and simply to users through the use of open, agile and cheaper digital technologies. It is only a prototype at the moment but it is significant in that it has been quickly put together and delivers exactly what it is supposed to do in a cost effective way. So how did they do it? Well they decided on a similar architecture to Livetalkback – Open source software based on Ubuntu Server in a public cloud. Full details of the technology used is at:

http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/colophon

British tax payers will take heart form the knowledge that someone in the Cabinet Office is looking at this and hopefully wondering why more Government services can’t be delivered like this. When it comes to engaging an audience and encouraging interaction in a cost effective way, Britain’s Got Talent and the Cabinet Office now have more in common than you’d think.

Here are the minutes of the server team meeting. They can also be found online with the irc log here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
• Oneiric Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion

Minutes

Meeting Actions

• All: spec peer reviews

Oneiric Development

Review blueprints!

• Thursday is feature definition freeze – We need peer reviews – See:
  • https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-o?searchtext=server-o
  • http://blueprints.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/+specs?role=assignee
• Question the implementation and direction. – Give feedback in whiteboard. – Daviey will send a post to ubuntu-server ml today with further details.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

smb reminded the team about his email asking about iscsitarget.

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

cp1 asked what we might do to better keep up with security updates. He feels we were slow with the last exim update, particularly compared to debian. jdstrand, kees, and dholbach came back with suggestions:

• kees pointed us to http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/main.html
• jdstrand informed us that as part of the security-o-community blueprint, 10-15 packages per month will be put up for community contributions.
• dholbach pointed out that if you are aware of an embargoed issue and have a patch, you can file a private security bug.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, May 31st at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Here are the minutes of the server team meeting. They can also be found online with the irc log here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting
• Oneiric Development
• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion

Minutes

Meeting Actions

• All: spec peer reviews

Oneiric Development

Review blueprints!

• Thursday is feature definition freeze – We need peer reviews – See:
  • https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-o?searchtext=server-o
  • http://blueprints.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/+specs?role=assignee
• Question the implementation and direction. – Give feedback in whiteboard. – Daviey will send a post to ubuntu-server ml today with further details.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

smb reminded the team about his email asking about iscsitarget.

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

cp1 asked what we might do to better keep up with security updates. He feels we were slow with the last exim update, particularly compared to debian. jdstrand, kees, and dholbach came back with suggestions:

• kees pointed us to http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-security/cve/main.html
• jdstrand informed us that as part of the security-o-community blueprint, 10-15 packages per month will be put up for community contributions.
• dholbach pointed out that if you are aware of an embargoed issue and have a patch, you can file a private security bug.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, May 31st at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting

1. Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations

• Natty Development

• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Meeting Actions

• ACTION: Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations (deferred)
• ACTION: Daviey to post another followup one euca-dhcp bug.
• ACTION: smb to look into kernel fs modules config for bug 732046

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• ACTION: Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations (deferred)

Natty Development

Apart from a few issues, in particular a dhcp bug in eucalyptus, and broken lxc container support with the latest openstack updates, Natty development is going well. ‘no OMG! issues…at least not yet ‘

Ubuntu Server Team Events

Planning is under way for an LXC development mini-conf. Location is undecided as yet. SpamapS will be speaking about ‘Run Drizzle on Your Narwhal’ on the 13th at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/detail/17640. Ubuntu Cloud days (http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/detail/17640) are next week Wednesday and Thursday, Mar 23-24. Open Stack summit is next month, zul will likely be there.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

Still blocked on euca (bug 717166). Daviey will post another followup one euca-dhcp bug.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Last week smb was mainly working on multipath debugging and looking at proposed xen patches. There is some work to do for -virtual config work. The config needs to be improved to include filesystem modules. smoser and smb will discuss further offline.

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

kim0 mentioned Ubuntu Cloud Days is next week (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays). We can add days to add more slots, so don’t be shy about proposing a topic. SpamapS may propose ensemble topics, with and without the ensemble team. ivoks mentioned that it would be nice to add vlan package to CD and possibly installed by default. This should be discussed at next UDS. ttx asked about the “Ubuntu Server Task Forces” (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-server. Daviey is says he absolutely is still looking at that.

Open Discussion

SpamapS feels that the meeting format could use streamlining. Perhaps this should be discussed at the next meeting. Please feel free to add it to the Agenda if you concur.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, Mar 22nd at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Agenda

• Review ACTION points from previous meeting

1. Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations

• Natty Development

• Ubuntu Server Team Events
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
• Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)
• Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community
• Open Discussion
• Announce next meeting date and time

Meeting Actions

• ACTION: Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations (deferred)
• ACTION: Daviey to post another followup one euca-dhcp bug.
• ACTION: smb to look into kernel fs modules config for bug 732046

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• ACTION: Daviey to talk with wider docs team regarding translations (deferred)

Natty Development

Apart from a few issues, in particular a dhcp bug in eucalyptus, and broken lxc container support with the latest openstack updates, Natty development is going well. ‘no OMG! issues…at least not yet ‘

Ubuntu Server Team Events

Planning is under way for an LXC development mini-conf. Location is undecided as yet. SpamapS will be speaking about ‘Run Drizzle on Your Narwhal’ on the 13th at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/detail/17640. Ubuntu Cloud days (http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2011/public/schedule/detail/17640) are next week Wednesday and Thursday, Mar 23-24. Open Stack summit is next month, zul will likely be there.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

Still blocked on euca (bug 717166). Daviey will post another followup one euca-dhcp bug.

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Last week smb was mainly working on multipath debugging and looking at proposed xen patches. There is some work to do for -virtual config work. The config needs to be improved to include filesystem modules. smoser and smb will discuss further offline.

Weekly Updates & Questions from the Ubuntu Community

kim0 mentioned Ubuntu Cloud Days is next week (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuCloudDays). We can add days to add more slots, so don’t be shy about proposing a topic. SpamapS may propose ensemble topics, with and without the ensemble team. ivoks mentioned that it would be nice to add vlan package to CD and possibly installed by default. This should be discussed at next UDS. ttx asked about the “Ubuntu Server Task Forces” (https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubuntutheproject-community-n-server. Daviey is says he absolutely is still looking at that.

Open Discussion

SpamapS feels that the meeting format could use streamlining. Perhaps this should be discussed at the next meeting. Please feel free to add it to the Agenda if you concur.

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, Mar 22nd at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

One of the benefits of the direction that’s been taken with the next release of Ubuntu is that there is no longer a need for a separate netbook edition. The introduction of the new shell for Ubuntu means that we have a user interface that works equally well whatever the form factor of the PC. And the underlying technology works on a range of architectures including those common in netbook, notebooks, desktops or whatever you choose to run it on. Hence the need for a separate version for netbooks is removed.

To be clear, this is the opposite of us withdrawing from the netbook market. In fact looking at the download figures on ubuntu.com interest in netbooks is not only thriving but booming. It’s us recognising that the market has moved on and celebrating that separate images are no longer a requirement as the much anticipated convergence of devices moves closer.

A return to the Ubuntu name

Which actually got us thinking about our naming conventions in totality. ‘Ubuntu Desktop Edition’ arose in 2005 as a response to the launch of Ubuntu Server Edition and our desire to distinguish between the two. But desktops are no longer the pre-eminent client platform. And actually naming the the ‘edition’ after any target technology is going to have us chasing the trend. Also we were tying ourselves to some ungainly product titles – Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition for instance. User feedback also told us that people thought the edition was not for them as they had a laptop and spent time looking for a ‘Laptop Edition’.

So we are going back to our roots. From 11.04 the core product that you run on your PC will be simply, Ubuntu. Therefore the next release will be Ubuntu 11.04 and you can run that, my friend, on anything you like from a netbook to a notebook to a desktop. Ubuntu Server will be maintained as a separate product of course and named simply, Ubuntu Server 11.04.

We think this will make things simpler. When we mean Ubuntu for notebooks we will say just that rather than the more confusing, ‘Ubuntu Desktop Edition for notebooks’. We are retaining the concept of ‘remixes’ for community projects and the naming convention therein. And we would love to hear what you think.

(Reproduced from James Page’s blog post, a member of the Ubuntu Server Team)

Many of you may have wondered what I [James Page] have been doing since UDS-N; some of you may have know that I have been working on packaging Jenkins (nee Hudson) from source along with all of its build dependencies (all 80 of them).

After just over 3 months I’ve managed to get a 99% built from source Jenkins into the Hudson Ubuntu Testing PPA; this is core Jenkins only at this point in time; no plugins come bundled (although you can still install them using the Plugin Manager).

If you want to help out with testing, read on….

Getting started

So first things first; lets add the Jenkins testing PPA and install the jenkins package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hudson-ubuntu/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jenkins

Wait some time and Jenkins should be up and running.

Accessing Jenkins

Once the package has installed you should be able to access Jenkins on http://localhost:8080 (or whatever server you installed it on).

Jenkins comes completely empty; no jobs, minimal configuration, no security.  Follow the normal Jenkins ‘Use Jenkins‘ guide to get started.

Reporting problems

This is a testing package so it ain’t going to be perfect. Please join the hudson-ubuntu-users team and subscribe to the mailing list on launchpad to discuss general issues and report problems.

You can also find me (jamespage) in #ubuntu-server on Freenode if you like to use IRC.

Whats still todo?

Well as I said this is 99% built from source; a few packages are either binary packages (built from jars) or packages that bundle their dependencies in the upstream source bundle. I’m working with upstream(s) to get these issues sorted.

That said, everything that is installed on your server or desktop in the jenkins package IS built from source. Offending packages are either used for testing or generating documentation during library builds.

I’m also going to start working on packaging a few core plugins from source (see the associated blueprint for details); for the time being you can download and install from within Jenkins. I will also create a patch so that this feature can be disable if required.  Please feel free to apply to join the team if you want to package a plugin.

The Future

Well ultimately probably the main Ubuntu archive and Debian; but lets leave that until next release….

And if you were wondering, Hudson renamed itself to Jenkins in late January (hence the Hudson name keeps creeping into this post).

(Reproduced from James Page’s blog post, a member of the Ubuntu Server Team)

Many of you may have wondered what I [James Page] have been doing since UDS-N; some of you may have know that I have been working on packaging Jenkins (nee Hudson) from source along with all of its build dependencies (all 80 of them).

After just over 3 months I’ve managed to get a 99% built from source Jenkins into the Hudson Ubuntu Testing PPA; this is core Jenkins only at this point in time; no plugins come bundled (although you can still install them using the Plugin Manager).

If you want to help out with testing, read on….

Getting started

So first things first; lets add the Jenkins testing PPA and install the jenkins package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hudson-ubuntu/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jenkins

Wait some time and Jenkins should be up and running.

Accessing Jenkins

Once the package has installed you should be able to access Jenkins on http://localhost:8080 (or whatever server you installed it on).

Jenkins comes completely empty; no jobs, minimal configuration, no security.  Follow the normal Jenkins ‘Use Jenkins‘ guide to get started.

Reporting problems

This is a testing package so it ain’t going to be perfect. Please join the hudson-ubuntu-users team and subscribe to the mailing list on launchpad to discuss general issues and report problems.

You can also find me (jamespage) in #ubuntu-server on Freenode if you like to use IRC.

Whats still todo?

Well as I said this is 99% built from source; a few packages are either binary packages (built from jars) or packages that bundle their dependencies in the upstream source bundle. I’m working with upstream(s) to get these issues sorted.

That said, everything that is installed on your server or desktop in the jenkins package IS built from source. Offending packages are either used for testing or generating documentation during library builds.

I’m also going to start working on packaging a few core plugins from source (see the associated blueprint for details); for the time being you can download and install from within Jenkins. I will also create a patch so that this feature can be disable if required.  Please feel free to apply to join the team if you want to package a plugin.

The Future

Well ultimately probably the main Ubuntu archive and Debian; but lets leave that until next release….

And if you were wondering, Hudson renamed itself to Jenkins in late January (hence the Hudson name keeps creeping into this post).

Agenda

Review ACTION points from previous meeting
ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bugs

http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html

Natty Development

Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)

Weekly Updates & Questions for the Ubuntu Community Team (kim0)
Open Discussion
Announce next meeting date and time
Tuesday, February 1 2011 16:00 UTC

Minutes

The last full meeting had resulted in no new actions. The only action item was “ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bug” at http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html. This is carried forward at SpamapS’s suggestion. robbiew announced that Natty development is goin gwell and we’ve made great progress on work items.

smb is working on bug 686692 (natty kernel does not boot on ec2 t1.micro), but had not yet found a final solution. He also pushed a lucid SRU for bug 614853 (kernel panic divide error: 0000 [#1] SMP). Some discussion ensued on bug 704022 (“xen_emul_unplug=unnecessary on kernel cmdline is required in ec2 hvm”), to be continued offline.

Finally, the channel as a whole skillfully evaded the question “should ubuntu try to look like windows or Mac or neither?”.

Meeting Actions

ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bugs (carried over)

http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html

Agree on next meeting date and time

Next meeting will be on Tuesday, January 25th at 16:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Log

[16:01] #startmeeting
[16:01] Meeting started at 10:01. The chair is hallyn.
[16:01] Commands Available: [TOPIC], [IDEA], [ACTION], [AGREED], [LINK], [VOTE]
[16:01] *\o/* gooooo rally!
[16:01] hallyn: err, ok you can do it if you want.
[16:02] [TOPIC] Review ACTION points from previous meeting
[16:02] New Topic: Review ACTION points from previous meeting
[16:02] ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bugs
[16:02] http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html
[16:02] LINK received: http://people.canonical.com/~chucks/SRUTracker/sru-tracker-bugs.html
[16:02] everyone rais your hands if you’re NOT guilty
[16:03] That one should, I think, roll forward for a bit longer so we remember that its important.
[16:03] at least until 10.04.2
[16:03] [ACTION] ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bugs
[16:03] ACTION received: ALL: please check the SRU tracker for ‘needs-verification’ bugs
[16:03] SpamapS: sounds good, i’ll try to remember to keep the link in with the action when i carry over
[16:04] robbiew to review ServerTeam wiki [carried over]
[16:04] i thought that was done?
[16:04] hm, is robbiew in?
[16:04] I recall him claiming he’d done it as well.
[16:04] o/
[16:04] hm, didn’t get updated on the meeting page…
[16:05] robbiew: ^ ServerTeam wiki all reviewed and uptodate?
[16:05] yeah i totally missed the boat on the server page
[16:06] yup…at least the external one
[16:06] zul: meaning action items aren’t updated? in that case let me search the logs for the real ction items
[16:07] Hi everyone!
[16:09] ShootEmUp: welcome!
[16:09] glad to be here
[16:10] feh, there, jan 4
[16:10] yay, there ARE no actions from the jan 4 meeting
[16:11] \o/
[16:11] so, barring objections (i.e. if i’m mistaken), i’ll move on
[16:11] none? what do they do in those meetings?
[16:11] [TOPIC] Natty Development
[16:11] New Topic: Natty Development
[16:11] ShootEmUp: play duke nukem
[16:11] robbiew: ^ over to you
[16:11] hallyn, what?
[16:12] * robbiew wonders why he covers the one topic he doesn’t do
[16:12] heh
[16:12] so we made great progress on work items
[16:12] charlie-tca!
[16:12] lots of Done’s, Postpones, and dropped
[16:12] all goodness
[16:12] I haven’t checked bugs yet
[16:13] but I usually know of the serious ones…from the irc pings and email
[16:13] that’s it!
[16:13] Thanks Mr. Narwhal!
[16:13] I have a topic to debate
[16:13] [TOPIC] Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
[16:13] New Topic: Weekly Updates & Questions for the QA Team (hggdh)
[16:13] ShootEmUp: if its not related to the current topic please hold it until Open Discussion
[16:13] ShootEmUp: wait till the end of the meeting for Open Discussion
[16:13] okay
[16:14] didn’t actually see hggdh today, is he around?
[16:14] guess not, moving on, i know smb is here
[16:14] [TOPIC] Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
[16:14] New Topic: Weekly Updates & Questions for the Kernel Team (smb)
[16:15] So I did some little stuff last week but have no paper records, hence I am not sure anymore what that was
[16:15] Currently working on bug 686692
[16:15] Launchpad bug 686692 in linux (Ubuntu Natty) “natty kernel does not boot on ec2 t1.micro” [High,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/686692
[16:16] which I can locally reproduce but not yet found a final solution
[16:16] smb, Is that the bug that only happend on t1.micro i386′s?
[16:16] just that it would boot if the mem= is a multiple of 4
[16:16] Daviey, t1.micro but I believe both i386 and x86_64
[16:16] ah
[16:17] They are doing something different with memory layout too. Just not sure this is just something that happens too or related
[16:17] any questions for smb?
[16:18] Other thing I pushed for SRU in lucid is the paper over approach for bug 614853
[16:18] Launchpad bug 614853 in linux-ec2 (Ubuntu) “kernel panic divide error: 0000 [#1] SMP” [Medium,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/614853
[16:18] To keep until we found/got a real solution
[16:19] smb, What nasty effects does it have?
[16:19] The current patch just avoids the divide by zero. While the variable in question is supposed to never be zero in the first place
[16:20] So I sent two patches for sru, the one preventing the divide and one sort of debug patch to yell when the variable is set/left zero
[16:21] smoser, Are you arround?
[16:21] o/
[16:21] yeah, smb, i agree with that.
[16:22] Just saw your bug 704022
[16:22] Launchpad bug 704022 in linux (Ubuntu) “xen_emul_unplug=unnecessary on kernel cmdline is required in ec2 hvm” [Medium,Confirmed] https://launchpad.net/bugs/704022
[16:22] one thing i had considered would have been to just add the debugging bit, and let it crash
[16:22] Though I am a bit confused by the logs as the ones which say with option and working seem to contain drops into busybox as well
[16:22] even with info like “if you see this message, please add to bug at https://launcpad.net/…”
[16:23] smb i may have uploaded incorrect (un-trimmed) logs
[16:23] but it does fail
[16:23] smoser, What made me rethink a bit is that those affected people seem to run production severs with that and so maybe a avoid and complain is preferable
[16:24] yeah, so the reboot with argument i sjust not trimmed
[16:24] so it contains the previous boot log (thats why the busybox in the middle of it)
[16:24] http://launchpadlibrarian.net/62372677/restart-with-unplug-arg.txt
[16:24] LINK received: http://launchpadlibrarian.net/62372677/restart-with-unplug-arg.txt
[16:24] smoser, Ah ok. That xvd* does not show up without the option is ok. Though one would think the sd* devices should always
[16:25] smb, yeah, i agree, getting people actually fixed is good, but if you fix the problem you’ll never get debug info
[16:25] they wont send it becuase they wont know they have a problem
[16:25] so do you want it changed? (let’s either make a decision, or move offline?)
[16:25] * SpamapS wonders if this couldn’t be discussed further offline?
[16:26] * SpamapS apologizes for smashing hallyn’s toes
[16:26] i can defer to smb’s decision.
[16:26] grrr
[16:26] ok – any other questions for smb?
[16:26] (or from)
[16:26] if not,
[16:26] I am done
[16:26] thanks, smb
[16:26] [TOPIC] Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)
[16:26] New Topic: Weekly Updates & Questions for the Documentation Team (sommer)
[16:27] sommer is not around
[16:27]
[16:27] yup
[16:27] [TOPIC] Weekly Updates & Questions for the Ubuntu Community Team (kim0)
[16:27] New Topic: Weekly Updates & Questions for the Ubuntu Community Team (kim0)
[16:27] kim0 is also not around
[16:27] and so, we move on to
[16:27] [TOPIC] Open Discussion
[16:27] New Topic: Open Discussion
[16:28] ShootEmUp: your turn
[16:28] should ubuntu try to look like windows or Mac or neither?
[16:28] lol
[16:29] ShootEmUp: you may want to ask that in #ubuntu
[16:29] like my old palm V
[16:29] ShootEmUp: indeed. This is the Server team meeting
[16:29] lol
[16:29] okay
[16:29] SpamapS: for some reason i thougth there was something you wanted to discuss?
[16:30] why does everybody always assume I want to TALK?
[16:30] no I’m good
[16:30]
[16:30] wow, first time for everything!
[16:30] anybody? going once…
[16:30] SpamapS: because you are a chatty cathy
[16:30] zul: whatever you nervous nelly
[16:30] going twice…
[16:31] SpamapS: i know what you are but what am i?
[16:31] [TOPIC] Announce next meeting date and time
[16:31] New Topic: Announce next meeting date and time
[16:31] hm, the meeting page says feb 1
[16:31] i dont’ think that’s right
[16:31] I would have assumed:
[16:31] 25th
[16:31] Tuesday, January 25 2011 16:00 UTC
[16:32] ok, another almost action-free meeting.
[16:32] thanks all
[16:32] #endmeeting
[16:32] Meeting finished at 10:32.

MeetingLogs/Server/20110118 (last edited 2011-01-21 17:57:47 by Serge Hallyn)