FewBar.com – Make it good

Time to give myself a little pat on the back.

Last week I sat down to work for a whole working day on “whatever I wanted to”, as part of the Canonical Server Team’s pilot “Fedex Day” program. Mathias Gug and I both looked at this idea from Dan Pink’s book “Drive” and thought it made sense to try it out.

Management approved, and we set about on a day of “work on one thing, make it go, and then show it off the following week”.

I was originally going to work on improving the search capabilities of the MoinMoin wiki software that we use at Canonical. But it turns out, somebody already did that by adding Xapian support, and so we really just need to backport that to whatever version of Ubuntu canonical’s servers run on.

So, I decided to tackle another issue that has been nagging at me. Continue reading

Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS released | The Fridge.

This is pretty cool. I know as a system administrator, I never wanted to run .0 anything. So 10.04 is really like 10.04.0, and means “let somebodye lse find the bugs.”.

Well 10.04.1 means that the more conservative administrators can at least have a reasonable expectation that it will be even more stable than it was on release day in April.

If you’re already running Ubuntu servers, btw, check this out:

http://maps.ubuntu.com

Hit it and be counted as a server user. Pretty amazing how many little orange circles there are all over the world.

For those of you who’ve been telling me that my blog posts sound like “gleep ork boog florg”, a quick primer:

Ubuntu is an operating system, like Mac OS X or Windows (except more awesomer).

10.04 was their April, 2010 release (10 == 2010 04 == april).

LTS means Long Term Support. This means that the people who maintain Ubuntu will support this release for 3 – 5 years (depending on the context.. 3 for desktops, 5 for servers).

10.04.1 is a fixed up release, mainly marking the release of updated CD images for installing. If you install 10.04 and choose automatic updates, you’re already on 10.04.1 before the release.

If you love Ubuntu, and want to help out, join us for Ubuntu Bug Day tomorrow!

No not New Deal Tobacco & Candy Company, nor Nike or Pepsi (though, I can’t wait forever guys, come on!)

No, I’m talking about my Debian and Ubuntu sponsors. Without you, all of my hard work would be sitting in a queue somewhere with no love.

You see, just because I work for Canonical, doesn’t mean I get an automatic berth in the Ubuntu Developer community, nor does it give me any clout with the Debian Developers. The beauty of the open source community, is that it is and probably always will be, a meritocracy. What have you done? What is your level of commitment? How well you can answer those questions at any given time defines how much people trust you, and therefore, your level of autonomy and leadership.

So, folks like me who have just entered the fray in Ubuntu, and who only dabbled in Debian, must prove ourselves. And, to whom will we prove ourselves? Why, sponsor developers.

So, without further ado, These are a few of the sponsors who have made sure that my work has gotten out there in the past few weeks and months, and a few who have made sure that my * shoddy* work has not. THANKS GUYS!

• Chuck Short (zul) – Ubuntu uploads of bug fixes and warranted critiques of half-assed PHP solutions.
• Dustin Kirkland (kirkland) – Ubuntu uploads of bug fixes.
• Scott Moser (smoser) – merging changes for cloud-utils and uploading to Ubuntu
• Chris Cheney (ccheney) – Upload of gearman-interface source package into Debian (my first debian upload!)
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) – Reviewed first gearman-interface package and convinced me to upload a proper gearman-interface package w/ swig bindings
• Piotr Ożarowski (POX) – Educated me on finer points of Debian Python Policy
• Thierry Carrez (ttx) – Upload of various bug fixes into Ubuntu, and sparing me “The look”
• Matt Zimmerman (mdz) – Instruction on proper maintainer script procedures for memcached
• Mathias Gug (mathiaz) – Endless attention to detail while reviewing my merge proposals, and “SNAILS!”
• Thomas Goirand – Responsiveness on crusty old packages like libdbi
• Kees Cook (kees) – MIR reviews for Ubuntu, and convincing me to get on the metro back to the hotel instead of face the Prague deluge with my little 100Kč (about $5 US) umbrella
• The people I’ve missed – I can’t remember everyone, but thank you if you helped me and Ubuntu, and Debian out!

I’ll try to do this more often, but I don’t know if I can really single everyone out. Its amazing how many people work together so smoothly, despite the group above being spread out over, by my count, at least 7 countries and 5 time zones.

So, in my role at Canonical, I’ve been asked to package some of the hotter “web 2.0″ and “cloud” server technologies for Ubuntu‘s next release, 10.10, aka “Maverick Meerkat”.

While working on this, I’ve discovered something very frustrating from a packaging point of view thats been going on with fast moving open source projects. It would seem that rather than produce stable API’s that do not change, there is a preference to dump feature after feature into libraries and software products Continue reading

• btrfs – BTRFS is pretty awesome, with filesystem level snapshotting and compression, it promises to make some waves on the server and small devices. Unfortunately, its still marked as EXPERIMENTAL by its own developers, and there are known bugs. However, you can choose to play with it in Ubuntu 10.04, which should be helpful for people finding and submitting bugs so the developers can feel better about people using it. There is a desire to have it as the default filesystem for the next Ubuntu LTS release, which is pretty exciting.
• Monitoring is too easy – Any time I see 10+ implementations of the same idea, I figure its probably something that is easy enough that people tend to write their own instead of searching for a solution. Monitoring and graphing seem to be in this category, with many solutions such as nagios, opennms, zenoss, munin, ganglia… the list goes on and on. We talked a lot about what to do in Ubuntu Server to make sure this is done well and makes sense, and basically ran out of time. The best part of the session though, was that we decided to focus on solving the data collection problem first, so each server takes responsibility for itself, and then allow centralized aggregation on another level.
• Server Community – There is some desire to have people test Ubuntu Server before a release, especially for the LTS releases. A beta program was proposed, but there is some doubt (my own included) that this will actually get people to test before the .0 release. Basically I have to think that as a server admin, people aren’t interested in even trying something in an unstable state. They’ll take the .0 and build a new server rev, but they’re not going to go around upgrading stable servers. This needs more thought and discussion definitely.

Sitting in the first session for Wednesday now listening to a session about the next 6 months of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and Eucalyptus development. Very exciting stuff!

As of next Monday, I will officially be in the employ of Canonical as a member of the Ubuntu Server Team. Please come say hi if you’re going to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, as I’ll be there all week (try the fish!).