Entries tagged as opensource
Wednesday, June 4. 2014
Since the beginning of this year, I'm a happy Lenovo ThinkPad T440 user. All components are supported on Linux (currently running Ubuntu 14.04 on it) — everything Just Worked "out of the box" after the installation. This has been my experience with all previous ThinkPad models so far (I also owned a T42, T60 and T420 before).
The laptop came with Windows 8 pre-installed, which I found very confusing to use (I haven't had actively worked with Windows for quite some time). But since I replaced the built-in hard disk drive with an SSD anyway (a 500GB Samsung EVO 840), that problem was solved quite quickly. Installing Linux via an USB stick was a simple affair, it most cases you can simply download and dd the ISO image on the USB stick and select it as the boot device on the next reboot by pressing F12 at the right moment.
However, not having Windows installed on another partition and not owning an external CD-ROM/DVD-drive, I now faced one problem: how to update the BIOS? Lenovo only provides a Windows-based tool and an ISO image that contains the BIOS update utility and the new firmware. However, this ISO-Image does not boot from an USB stick directly, so the dd method does not work.
Fortunately, like many times before, the ThinkWiki came to the rescue — their page about BIOS update without optical disk gave me the right clues. I downloaded the ISO image containing the BIOS update from the Lenovo Support web site and plugged in an empty USB stick, which appeared as /dev/sdc in the device list (the T440 has a built-in 16GB SSD on /dev/sdb.
The ISO image actually contains a (bootable) hard disk image, which can be dumped on an USB stick directly. To extract the image, I used geteltorito from the genisoimagepackage:
$ geteltorito -o bios.img gjuj13us.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 32768 sector(s) of 512 Bytes
Image has been written to file "bios.img".
$ sudo dd if=bios.img of=/dev/sdc
32768+0 records in
32768+0 records out
16777216 bytes (17 MB) copied, 0,641393 s, 26,2 MB/s
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 16.0 GB, 16013942784 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15272 cylinders, total 31277232 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdc1 32 32767 16368 1 FAT12
There's my bootable USB stick. Rebooting the laptop and choosing the USB stick from the boot menu (F12) properly booted into the BIOS update utility and allowed me to update the BIOS to the latest version. No Windows required!
Thursday, May 8. 2014
The German Unix User Group (GUUG) will hold their annual conference "Frühjahrsfachgespräch" on September 23-26 this year (I know, not really "Frühjahr" anymore, but this is how it is).
The Call for Presentations is still open until May 31st. Talks can be proposed in German and English, and there are slots for longer tutorials as well.
The range of possible topics is broad, so if you think you have anything interesting to share with a very passionate and technical audience of sysadmins and developers, here are some suggestions:
- Operating Systems/Applications: architectures, privilege concepts, new developments, administration, mobile systems
- Relevant new OS Kernel features: new developments in Linux-, BSD- or other Spen Source OS kernels
- Networking: protocols, technologies
- Virtualisation/High Availability: OS, networks, cluster, SAN, file services (high-) avialability, OS/storage virtualisation and cloud
- File systems: distributed file systems, cluster file systems, special purpose file systems
- Middleware: databases, application servers, etc.
- IT Security: organisational and technical aspects
- Data Center Infrastructure: climate control, energy efficiency and monitoring
- Operations: monitoring, backup/recovery
- Non-technical Topics: work organisation, legal aspects, licensing and patents, education and training
This year, I'm honoured to be part of the reviewing committee and we've received a number of interesting proposals already. But we'd like to see more!
So please don't hesitate and submit your proposal now!
Thank you.
Sunday, February 23. 2014
I'm happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.15. It is now available for download from http://lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/ and https://launchpad.net/mylvmbackup
Probably the biggest highlight of 0.15 is the addition of zbackup as an additional backup type. I'd like to thank Ivan Korjavin for contributing this new feature.
Additionally, this release provides several improvements and bug fixes. For example, it's now possible to back up more than a single my.cnf configuration file by providing a directory name like /etc/mysql instead.
Please see the ChangeLog and bzr history for more details.
Wednesday, November 13. 2013
This year's conference season is coming to an end for me soon – I have three more events to go before I can enjoy the Christmas holidays:
On 2013-11-20, I'll be at the DOAG Konferenz in Nuremberg (Germany), where I will talk about the following topics (in German):
I've also submitted a proposal for an "Unconference" (or BOF) about Oracle Linux - this will take place on the same day, at 12:00-13:00.
From Nuremberg I will travel directly to Munich, where I will speak about Oracle Linux at a Private Cloud mit Oracle Linux und Oracle VM Seminar on Thursday, 2013-11-21. If you would like to learn more about how to set up and manage your private cloud infrastructure using Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager, this event gives you an opportunity to talk to customers who share their experiences and experts that can provide additional background information. This is a free event, registration via the event web site is required.
Early in December (2013-12-02/2013-12-03), I'll be attending the UKOUG Tech Conference in Manchester (UK) speaking about the following topic:
Here's a short recap of some past events I attended earlier this year:
On 2013-08-24/2013-08-25 I attended FrOSCon 8 in St. Augustin (Germany). Oracle was a silver sponsor and exhibitor — I was there to represent Oracle Linux at our booth. It was really nice to meet many people that I had not seen for quite a while. FrOSCon was well organized (as usual), the only bummer was that the weather did not cooperate and the social event could not take place outside.
2013-09-22/2013-09-25 - Oracle OpenWorld 2013 - San Francisco (US). In addition to attending numerous meetings with customers, I also contributed to the event with the following sessions:
Friday, April 29. 2011
Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...
I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.
In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:
Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.
Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!
See you in Berlin!
Wednesday, February 2. 2011
It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium. This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:
I would like to thank all speakers for their submissions and for the efforts they are willing to go through in order to make it to this event! If you happen to be at FOSDEM this year, please stop by and join us. We also plan to head out for a meetup over dinner after the event. If you would like to attend, please register, so we can take you into account! (Thanks a lot for Kenny Gryp for organizing this meetup)
Thursday, January 6. 2011
Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!
If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:
- A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
- A GUI version that starts up the Firefox browser in a minimalistic GNOME desktop to perform the installation locally. Remote network access is available, too.
The database backend is MySQL 5.1, with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled. phpMyAdmin has been added to support web-based administration of the MySQL server. You can access it via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/. I also added drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface and some additional packages (yast2-http-server, bind-utils, php5-ctype, patch). I also bumped up the appliance's version number to 7.0.0, to match the version number of Drupal included.
The appliance is available in various formats:
- A live raw disk image, ready to be written to an USB stick or flash drive
- A live ISO image, to be burned on a CD or used in a virtual machine
- A hard disk image, to be dumped on a hard disk drive
- Various virtual disk formats, e.g. OVF, VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM and Xen
Please see the installation instructions provided on the download pages for details on how to use the various image formats.
So congratulations to the Drupal developer community for reaching this goal and thanks to SuSE/Novell/Attachmate for providing the infrastructure for creating such appliances. I also would like to especially thank Richard Bos for the testing and many suggestions for improvement of these appliances!
Thursday, December 9. 2010
Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!
You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.
Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on Saturday 5th 2011, from 13:00 till 19:00. Each session will last 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A. See this year's schedule for inspiration — I think we had a great lineup of talks that addressed a good mixture of MySQL-related topics. I am looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks in advance for your support.
Monday, November 29. 2010
I've been going through our bugs database to compile a list of some noteworthy patch contributions that have been included in the MySQL 5.5 release. Of course any contribution is appreciated, no matter how small! And the list is probably not complete — please let me know if I'm missing any. I omitted a number of smaller patches that fixed compile issues and I only considered contributions that were tracked in our bug database and were tagged as "Contribution".
Note that these are new patches that have not been part of any other MySQL release — of course, all contributions from previous releases are included in 5.5 as well. We also received a few patches for InnoDB (particularly by Mark Callaghan and his team mates at Google/Facebook), which were incorporated in the InnoDB plugin in MySQL 5.1 (and hence got included in the InnoDB version of MySQL 5.5, too).
Here they are, in no particular order:
- BUG#13175: SHA2 function (Patch contributed by Bill Karwin)
- BUG#14104: FLUSH LOGS now takes an optional log_type value so that FLUSH log_type LOGS can be used to flush only a specified log type. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)
- BUG#27249: Aliases for wildcards (as in SELECT t.* AS 'alias' FROM t) are no longer accepted and result in an error. Previously, such aliases were ignored silently. (Patch contributed by Martin Friebe)
- BUG#40368: mysqld_safe did not honor underscores in the same way as dashes for server options (Patch contributed by Erik Ljungstrom)
- BUG#45767: Removal of Field::pack_key, Field::unpack_key, Field::pack_cmp storage engine functions (Patch contributed by Zardosht Kasheff)
- BUG#50057: SHOW PROFILE CPU port for Windows (Patch contributed by Alex Budkovski)
- BUG#5724: "mysqladmin password" prompts for a password when none is provided on the command line (Patch contributed by Harrison Fisk)
- BUG#26780: A new mysql client option "--auto-vertical-output", which causes the client to test whether a result table is too wide for the current window (where available) and emit vertical results in that case. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)
A big "Thank you" to all the contributors!
Tuesday, November 2. 2010
Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.
Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.
Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.
Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!
Monday, November 1. 2010
It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)! As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with excellent tech talks. Take a look at this year's schedule for some examples! I hope we can assemble an even more exciting and interesting schedule for next year. Quoting from my last year's call for papers: We are looking for covering a wide range of topics that attract both MySQL DBAs as well as application developers that work with MySQL as their database of choice. Are you developing a new storage engine or other plugin? Do you want to share your experiences and best practices in administering or deploying MySQL servers? Did you develop a new method to scale a MySQL setup? Let us and the audience know about it! You can submit your talk proposal via this submission form. The deadline for turning in your proposal is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010, after which there will be a voting and rating period to identify the most interesting and attractive topics. Please check the FOSDEM 2011 information page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you have any questions or suggestions. I look forward to your proposals!
Monday, October 25. 2010
 Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.
In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!
The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.
Friday, October 15. 2010
Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!
Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:
Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.
Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.
Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.
Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.
Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme 
Saturday, September 18. 2010
The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.
If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.
You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.
After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.
Friday, August 27. 2010
Auf der amoocon 2010 in Rostock wurde ich von Ralf Spenneberg angesprochen, ob ich nicht Lust hätte, auf seiner OpenSource-Konferenz einen Vortrag zum Thema MySQL zu halten. Die habe ich – am 23. September um 14:30 werde ich dort etwas zum Thema "MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit" erzählen. Der Vortrag soll einen Überblick darüber geben, mit welchen Mitteln und Methoden man einen MySQL-Server ausfallsicher machen kann und welche Aspekte dabei zu berücksichtigen sind. Die OpenSource Trends Days erstrecken sich über zwei Tage; am ersten Tag gibt es Tutorien zu den Themen "Check-MK - Das Nagios-Über-Plugin" und "Kolab - Der Exchange-Killer". Am zweiten Tag gibt es neben meinem Vortrag noch Beiträge zu Postfix, Kolab, Fehlertoleranz mit KVM und XEN, OpenVPN und Nagios – ein vielversprechendes Programm von namhaften Experten auf diesen Gebieten. Für Spenneberg-Bestandskunden ist die Teilnahme kostenlos, die reguläre Teilnahmegebühr ist mit 99 EUR pro Tag durchaus erschwinglich. Ich freue mich darauf!
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