Scott Dowdle will host an OpenVZ booth, plus will also be giving a presentation entitled Introduction to OS Virtualization, Containers, and OpenVZ.

]]> http://openvz.linuxguru.co.uk/utah-open-source-conference-2009-2/63/feed/ http://openvz.linuxguru.co.uk/utah-open-source-conference-2009/62/ http://openvz.linuxguru.co.uk/utah-open-source-conference-2009/62/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:00:12 +0000 openvz http://openvz.linuxguru.co.uk/utah-open-source-conference-2009/62/ Just wanted to post a blurb saying that there will be an OpenVZ booth at the Utah Open Source Conference 2009. I will also be giving a presentation entitled, Introduction to OS Virtualization, Containers, and OpenVZ.

So, if you live anywhere near Utah or the mid-west, please try to attend and stop by the booth and say hello.

What: Utah Open Source Conference 2009
When: October 8-10, 2009
Where: Miller Campus of the Salt Lake Community College

See links above for more details. I’ll be driving from the Bozeman, Montana area which is approximately 413 miles.

The first problem is “Compact messages” operation caused all the messages to, hmm, be ultimately compacted, or in plain words deleted. Have restored it from the backup, so a few messages written after the last backup were lost. I apologize if it caused any problems for you. Some people may still find messages that

Next problem is forum theme — basically you have to recreate it from scratch, haven’t done that yet, still thinking of what layout will be more convenient.

Yet another problem we found only today is with private messaging, basically rendering it useless. The thing is, a new version of forum software introduced a separate limits on total size of private messages for admins and moderators. Strange enough, upgrade script did’t care and just set the new values to zero! Tracked it down by reading the source code, fixed the limits, problem solved. Fortunately no one has seen it, except for the admins and moderators — which is kinda funny.

Also, I fixed a bug in the forum code (well, technically not a bug but a bad interaction of old version of PHP vs. forum software) which prevented indexing of non-latin (i.e. cyrillic, i.e. russian) messages. So now it’s possible for Russian-speaking users to use search.

Finally, I am still a bit unsure if the forum functions fine after the upgrade. So if you find any problems with forum, please let me know.

Currently 99% of all spam on the web is link spam — bad guys are adding lots of links to the sites they promote in order to increase page rank values for that sites. In fact they get no profit from that, since in all recent mediawiki installation (including wikipedia itself) all the external links comes with ref=”nofollow” attribute. That attribute is respected by Google crawler and other such bots and basically means “ignore this link”.

Nevertheless spammers keep inserting trash into such wikis. Recently such activity mostly comes in a form of a user page (or user talk page) creation that looks like, well, a legitimate user page (something along the lines of “My name is John Doe, I’m Java coder, my hobbies are swimming and fishing“) but with a blatant plug added (”Here are some cool sites: [1] [2] [3] …“).

For about 2 years or so wiki.openvz.org asks you to login/register in order to edit, so anonymous edits are not allowed. That helps a bit, but still there are bots that performs register, log in and post.

So now I have added another restriction: users that have just registered can not create new pages. Here “just registered” means “registered less than 24 hours ago”. Note that such users can still freely edit existing pages. Let’s see if it helps.

Oh, almost forgot to say it: looks like captchas don’t work at all! Either spammers have good OCR tools, or they hire enough human beings to “manually” decipher those cryptic images.

Second, my friend Bernhard and I helped Kir with his booth on the LinuxTag. It was a great pleasure for us because Kir is a really cool guy. We had the chance to hear and learn a lot about Kernel development and OpenVZ in general. Also it was very nice to discuss our OpenVZ server farm at work with Kir’s Know How. Quote "Kir: Uhh, you perl scripts are really hardcoded" - :o)

I hope we will see us before the next LinuxTag next year. As we spoke about we decide to help the project by doing support on the forum/blog and maybe some wiki stuff (system use case).

For all readers we took some pictures from the booth and us. You can find them on our blog page systec.blogsite.org.

Thank you - It was a lot of fun - Mario

If you happen to be on a different continent, North America, then I welcome you to visit LinuxSymposium. This is a quite a big annual event, and unlike LinuxWorld (which is now called OpenSourceWorld) they haven’t changed their name for 10 years (well, hmm, actually they dropped the Ottawa prefix since this year it will be held in Montreal — but at least they left the Linux part, the one that is most important for me). For the LinuxSymposium I am preparing a tutorial and a BoF. So, again, come to say hello!

Are there any OpenVZ users living not too far from Berlin* who can help me with the booth (i.e. be a booth star together with me)? Please contact me by leaving a comment here or email to kir at openvz dot org, I need your help.

* from my perspective every German city is not too far from Berlin but YMMV.

Say you want to create a container. You type vzct and press <TAB> — it completes that to vzctl and a space after. This is usual feature of bash — it looks all the binaries available in $PATH and tries to complete their names.

Now let’s see the vzctl completion:
# vzctl cr<TAB>
completes to
# vzctl create
and then after yet another <TAB> it suggests a CT ID which is the MAX+1 (i.e. if you have containers 101, 102 and 105 it will suggest 106):
# vzctl create 106
Now we want to specify an OS template:
# vzctl create 106 –os<TAB>
will get you to
# vzctl create 106 –ostemplate
and then you press <TAB> again twice to see the list of available OS templates:
# vzctl create 106 –ostemplate <TAB><TAB>
centos-5-x86 centos-5-x86-devel fedora-9-x86 suse-11.1-x86
Now you type in the first few characters of the OS template you want to use:
# vzctl create 106 –ostemplate f<TAB>
and it will complete that to
# vzctl create 106 –ostemplate fedora-9-x86
Now, unless you want to specify –config or some other parameters, just press Enter.

This completion is smart — say, if you want to start a container, type in
# vzctl start <TAB><TAB>
and it will give you the list of container IDs that can be started (i.e. all the stopped containers).

And so on and so forth. Well, you say, it doesn’t work! In that case you have to enable it, here’s how.

On a RHEL, CentOS or Fedora system run yum install bash-completion and then relogin (i.e. log out and log in again). If your host system is Gentoo, run emerge bash-completion and then eselect bashcomp enable vzctl. I hope someone will comment on how to enable this for Debian/Ubuntu/SUSE or whatever your favorite distro is.

In addition to a bunch of updated templates, this time we add a few new ones:
- Fedora 10 (aka Cambridge)
- openSUSE 11.1
- Ubuntu 9.04 (aka The Jaunty Jackalope)

OpenSUSE is interesting — apparently they dropped yum (which was available in 10.3 and 11.0 but not in 11.1) and now they have something called zypper. Also note that openSUSE lacks the code name. Apparently the SUSE guys are already aware of the issue and have a plan to fix it — the next release (openSUSE 11.2) will be codenamed Fichte, after the German XIIX century philosopher. Subsequent openSUSE releases will also be named after famous philosophers — Rousseau, Voltaire, Lessing (although I’m not sure which Lessing do they have in mind, probably Theodor). Interesting… maybe they got the naming idea from OpenVZ kernels.

Also, during the next update (i.e. in about a month, not now) we are going to remove a few templates that are old and unsupported:
- Debian 3.1 “Sarge” (EOL 30 Mar 2008)
- Fedora 7 (EOL 13 Jul 2008)
- openSUSE 10.3 (EOL 19 Sep 2008)
- Fedora 8 (EOL 7 Jan 2009)
- Ubuntu 7.10 (EOL 18 Apr 2009)
Anybody who’s using those distros inside containers should updated to something more (r|d)ecent and supported. You have been warned.

PS For people who use our stable kernels (i.e. RHEL5 branch) — please note that you have to update to the latest kernel (028stab062.3 at the moment) in order to use Fedora 10 in containers. This is due to a few new system calls recently added to the Linux kernel which Fedora 10 userland expect to have in the kernel. Those syscalls were just backported to our RHEL5 branch by the OpenVZ team.

OpenVZ project will have a booth at this year’s LinuxTag — one of the biggest and greatest Linux shows in Germany.