Disclaimer:This post is not really related to OpenVZ, but who cares? I don't... :) So from now on I will be writing more here, on just about everything.
In UNIX systems, system time is accounted as a number of seconds since so-called "UNIX epoch" -- 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC. This number of seconds is returned by system call time(), plus there are library routines to convert it to more human-appealing formats.
You can guess the number is pretty big nowdays, incrementing every second. In fact, it's already over a million seconds, and in about 1 hour it will be equal to 1234567890. For some people this is a good enough reason to have a beer or two in a good company. Check http://www.1234567890day.com/ for 1234567890 parties around the globe. As for myself, I will just watch the number growing. Some kind of a meditation, similar to staring at an open fire, or flowing water, or people at work... I can do that for hours! Just kidding...
On Linux, you can see the current time() using
In UNIX systems, system time is accounted as a number of seconds since so-called "UNIX epoch" -- 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC. This number of seconds is returned by system call time(), plus there are library routines to convert it to more human-appealing formats.
You can guess the number is pretty big nowdays, incrementing every second. In fact, it's already over a million seconds, and in about 1 hour it will be equal to 1234567890. For some people this is a good enough reason to have a beer or two in a good company. Check http://www.1234567890day.com/ for 1234567890 parties around the globe. As for myself, I will just watch the number growing. Some kind of a meditation, similar to staring at an open fire, or flowing water, or people at work... I can do that for hours! Just kidding...
On Linux, you can see the current time() using
date +%s command. Enjoy.In about a week I will be in Los Angeles for the annual Southern California Linux Expo, a.k.a. SCALE. It is quite a big event. Well, not quite as big as LinuxWorld or Linux Symposium, but still big enough and growing bigger each year. I'd like to say this conference is of good spirit, whatever that means.
Like the last year, we were granted a booth in the dot-org area (#63), plus I will be giving a talk titled "Recent advances in the Linux resource management", talking about cgroups, memory controller and stuff. Because of the booth I am not coming along -- Lesya Novaselskaya will hostess the booth. Lesya is working for Parallels as a Quality Assurance engineer, her job is to test various software including OpenVZ in order to make it bullet-proof and rock solid.
We still have lots of things to do to be fully prepared for the event. I have already created a brand new OpenVZ t-shirt design codenamed "kernel classics" which you can see on the right (also, here is the back design in hi-res). It plays around the fact that we name our 2.6.26- and 2.6.27-based kernels after famous Russian writers and painters, respectively. If you will be at the conference and tell us your OpenVZ story, you get your t-shirt. If you are not going to visit SCALE but eager to get such a t-shirt (not the same since I'm ordering from a different place, but with the very same graphics) you can buy it from cafepress (previous "container lifecycle" t-shirt is also available).
I hope I will also prepare the new DVD images containing a live CD OpenVZ distro which could be used to get a feeling of what OpenVZ is without installing it, plus all the latest kernels, tools and templates.
Like the last year, we were granted a booth in the dot-org area (#63), plus I will be giving a talk titled "Recent advances in the Linux resource management", talking about cgroups, memory controller and stuff. Because of the booth I am not coming along -- Lesya Novaselskaya will hostess the booth. Lesya is working for Parallels as a Quality Assurance engineer, her job is to test various software including OpenVZ in order to make it bullet-proof and rock solid.
I hope I will also prepare the new DVD images containing a live CD OpenVZ distro which could be used to get a feeling of what OpenVZ is without installing it, plus all the latest kernels, tools and templates.
We just published our Debian/Ubuntu appliance builder for OpenVZ (of course perfectly usable on Proxmox VE).
Short description
Creating high quality appliances is a difficult task and requires deep knowledge of the underlying operating system. So we created the 'Debian Appliance Builder' to simplify that task. 'dab' is a script to automate the creation of OpenVZ appliances. It is basically a rewrite of debootstrap in perl, but uses OpenVZ instead of chroot and generates OpenVZ templates. Another difference is that it supports multi-stage building of templates. That way you can execute arbitrary scripts between package installation steps to accomplish what you want.
Furthermore, some common tasks are fully automated - like setting up a database server (mysql or postgres). To accomplish minimal template creation time, packages are cached to a local directory, so you do not need a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror (although this would speed up the first run). All generated templates includes an appliance description file. Those can be used to build appliance repositories.
Virtual appliances are a well known and quite successful way to demonstrate and run server software. But till now, no high quality appliance builder for OpenVZ was available.
Anybody is talking about the economic and financial crisis – a good chance to bring powerful open source software to the enterprise customer – start now using OpenVZ for virtual appliances!
All details:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Debian_Appliance_Builder
Best Regards,
Martin Maurer
martin@proxmox.com
http://www.proxmox.com
________________________________________ ____________________________
Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH
Kohlgasse 51/10, 1050 Vienna, Austria
Short description
Creating high quality appliances is a difficult task and requires deep knowledge of the underlying operating system. So we created the 'Debian Appliance Builder' to simplify that task. 'dab' is a script to automate the creation of OpenVZ appliances. It is basically a rewrite of debootstrap in perl, but uses OpenVZ instead of chroot and generates OpenVZ templates. Another difference is that it supports multi-stage building of templates. That way you can execute arbitrary scripts between package installation steps to accomplish what you want.
Furthermore, some common tasks are fully automated - like setting up a database server (mysql or postgres). To accomplish minimal template creation time, packages are cached to a local directory, so you do not need a local Debian/Ubuntu mirror (although this would speed up the first run). All generated templates includes an appliance description file. Those can be used to build appliance repositories.
Virtual appliances are a well known and quite successful way to demonstrate and run server software. But till now, no high quality appliance builder for OpenVZ was available.
Anybody is talking about the economic and financial crisis – a good chance to bring powerful open source software to the enterprise customer – start now using OpenVZ for virtual appliances!
All details:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Debian_Appliance_Builder
Best Regards,
Martin Maurer
martin@proxmox.com
http://www.proxmox.com
________________________________________
Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH
Kohlgasse 51/10, 1050 Vienna, Austria
A new 2.6.27-based OpenVZ branch is opened, and the first 2.6.27-based OpenVZ is released.
The idea of using names instead of numbers for kernel releases is working for 2.6.26, and we decided to have some fun with 2.6.27 kernels, too. These kernels are [to be] named after famous Russian painters, of course in the alphabetical order.
First 2.6.27 OpenVZ kernel is named after Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Aivazovsky is a great painter and I'd love to add a link to some of his masterpieces here, but while trying to find a good reproduction of "The Ninth Wave" I realized that a typical notebook/PC is incapable of displaying such art. Then you try to fit a 2x3 meters painting into a 22" computer screen, nothing good is to be expected. Even in case of high resolution copy stored in a lossless format you either see a full picture but details are lost, or you see some part of it with all the details but then you don't see the full picture. So be aware that a painting that you see online is a pathetic shadow of what you can enjoy in a real (i.e. offline) museum or art gallery.
The 2.6.27-aivazovsky kernel, on the other side, is perfect for you PC, so enjoy.
The idea of using names instead of numbers for kernel releases is working for 2.6.26, and we decided to have some fun with 2.6.27 kernels, too. These kernels are [to be] named after famous Russian painters, of course in the alphabetical order.
First 2.6.27 OpenVZ kernel is named after Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky. Aivazovsky is a great painter and I'd love to add a link to some of his masterpieces here, but while trying to find a good reproduction of "The Ninth Wave" I realized that a typical notebook/PC is incapable of displaying such art. Then you try to fit a 2x3 meters painting into a 22" computer screen, nothing good is to be expected. Even in case of high resolution copy stored in a lossless format you either see a full picture but details are lost, or you see some part of it with all the details but then you don't see the full picture. So be aware that a painting that you see online is a pathetic shadow of what you can enjoy in a real (i.e. offline) museum or art gallery.
The 2.6.27-aivazovsky kernel, on the other side, is perfect for you PC, so enjoy.
Consider this as a new year gifts from Father Frost, or Dad Moroz, or Santa Clous, or me, if you so prefer.
First gift is a new fresh set of precreated templates, which spent quite some time in beta before. Those are the same templates, but updated couple of days ago, plus there is Ubuntu-8.10 added. I hope I will update those monthly or so, since now I have some automation in place. A 'date' column was added to list of template files on wiki so you can easily see how old are those.
Second one is new shiny SSL certificates for https://wiki.openvz.org/ and https://bugzilla.openvz.org/. I call it shiny because they are neither self-signed nor bough from a commercial certificate authority. As you can see they are CAcert.org certificates. CAcert is an organisation which is building so-called web of trust, and acts as a certificate authority for its members. If you need free certificates, you are welcome to join. And, if you decide to trust CAcert as a certificate authority and your browser isn't configured for it yet, you have to import their root certificate.
Finally, a new 2.6.24 kernel is coming out later today. Others will follow. Update: here it is, 2.6.24-ovz007.1.
First gift is a new fresh set of precreated templates, which spent quite some time in beta before. Those are the same templates, but updated couple of days ago, plus there is Ubuntu-8.10 added. I hope I will update those monthly or so, since now I have some automation in place. A 'date' column was added to list of template files on wiki so you can easily see how old are those.
Second one is new shiny SSL certificates for https://wiki.openvz.org/ and https://bugzilla.openvz.org/. I call it shiny because they are neither self-signed nor bough from a commercial certificate authority. As you can see they are CAcert.org certificates. CAcert is an organisation which is building so-called web of trust, and acts as a certificate authority for its members. If you need free certificates, you are welcome to join. And, if you decide to trust CAcert as a certificate authority and your browser isn't configured for it yet, you have to import their root certificate.
Finally, a new 2.6.24 kernel is coming out later today. Others will follow. Update: here it is, 2.6.24-ovz007.1.
I will be a guest on The Linux Link Tech Show this evening (Wednesday, Dec. 17th) representing the OpenVZ Project so check it out. It will be streamed live starting at 8:30PM Eastern Standard Time and here are links for your favorite audio application that can stream over http:
At some point after the live show, it will be archived and available for download as an .mp3 or .ogg.
At some point after the live show, it will be archived and available for download as an .mp3 or .ogg.
Since the last intro video I made was over 1.5 years ago, I thought I'd make a new one.
Robert Nelson released updated versions of vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher... as well as updated OS Template metadata packages for Fedora, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. In all there are 48 different OS Templates that can easily be built using his software. I'm hoping to get more people in the community interested/involved so I made a screencast. If more people get involved, do more testing, and provide feedback... hopefully at some point in the not too distant future Robert's new software can replace the stock vzpkg that the OpenVZ Project provides.
Today is definitely a day of releases.
OpenVZ project has released both new vzctl and vzquota tools today.
New vzctl has a handful of new small features and a bunch of bugfixes, including compatibility with recent glibc, bash, and kernel headers.
New vzquota has only one (but quite useful) new feature -- an ability to explain what's wrong when it can not turn container's disk quota on or off. Recent OpenVZ kernels have a feature to report open files in container's private area, and now with the new vzquota the feature is finally available for mere mortals.
In the meantime Parallels has released Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0 -- and that's just a coincidence, I'm sure they do not sync their release cycles with OpenVZ. Or maybe it's not a coincidence... We're sitting in the same office and for the last few weeks they've been providing free late dinners because of their release, that maybe made me leave the office later and thus maybe gave more time to work on OpenVZ tools. :)
OpenVZ project has released both new vzctl and vzquota tools today.
New vzctl has a handful of new small features and a bunch of bugfixes, including compatibility with recent glibc, bash, and kernel headers.
New vzquota has only one (but quite useful) new feature -- an ability to explain what's wrong when it can not turn container's disk quota on or off. Recent OpenVZ kernels have a feature to report open files in container's private area, and now with the new vzquota the feature is finally available for mere mortals.
In the meantime Parallels has released Parallels Desktop for Mac 4.0 -- and that's just a coincidence, I'm sure they do not sync their release cycles with OpenVZ. Or maybe it's not a coincidence... We're sitting in the same office and for the last few weeks they've been providing free late dinners because of their release, that maybe made me leave the office later and thus maybe gave more time to work on OpenVZ tools. :)
For the last few days I was digging into a project to make OpenVZ running on this Overo thing. That involved patching OpenVZ kernel to support ARM architecture, building vzctl package (.ipk) for ARM using bitbake, and creating a template.
It was amazingly easy to port the OpenVZ kernel to ARM; you can see here that besides a big-all-in-one-openvz-for-2.6.27 patch I only had to add 4 tiny ARM-specific patches (1, 2, 3, 4). For vzctl, it was even easier -- all I had to do is to add openvz syscall numbers for ARM which were added, and create a bitbake recipe file.
Creating a template for ARM architecture was tougher but I managed to win that fight, too -- you can find a Debian Lenny template here.
Here is an except from a terminal session showing OpenVZ on Overo:( a copy/paste from terminalCollapse )
Please note that all this is still in very alpha stage -- there are errors, bugs, ugly warnings, you have to modify some things in place etc. But it's working. If someone is interested in running OpenVZ on ARM hardware, please let me know -- leave a comment here or email kir (A) openvz (.) org.
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Do you still stand by your opinions above now in 2016?…