Episode 8: Back to the Kernel With Greg Kroah-Hartman

In the News:

• Seth Falcon, Development Lead at Opscode, recently published his presentation, ”How to Migrate a Web App to Erlang, Change Databases, and Not Have Your Customers Notice.” Check out the slides over on Speaker Deck.
• While you’re at Speaker Deck, check out @lusis’s UnNamed Talk which is a talk about ops, logs, and metrics with a bit of Wil Wheaton thrown in for good measure.
• Hector Castro recently wrote a post on the Trading Fish blog about Running Chef Recipes Once. With a small block of code, you can remove a recipe from a node’s run list after successful execution.
• On the Cryptocracy blog, Zac Stevens announced a managed_directory LWRP he’s been working on. It provides an LWRP to declare that a directory’s contents are entirely managed by Chef. When a node is converged, any files present in the managed_directory that are not managed by Chef will be removed. This is still a work in progress with the code posted on github. Be sure to read the caveats in the README before using the LWRP. Let Zac know if this is something you’re interested in. He’s looking for suggestions and pull requests.
• Recently, Fletcher Nichol posted a comment in a github issue that provided a little detail on Chef’s 2-phase run. From time-to-time you see or hear about flame wars raging on github around a specific issue or commit. It’s great to see this sort of comment and collaboration happening in our space.
• Sam Pikesley has started a Chef tutorial, Learn Yourself Some Chef. Run through the tutorial or contribute your own lessons on github.
• GeekWire, an independent technology news site and online community based in Seattle, Washington recently announced some Start Up awards and Opscode is up for an award in the “Next Tech Titan” category. Head over to Geekwire to cast your vote. Check the show notes for a link.
• Matt Ray is looking for people interested in Fog support for Rackspace’s OpenStack-based beta. Head over to github to check out the code and help Matt out.
• The next batch of #ChefConf speakers and sessions was recently announced. Checkout chefconf.opscode.com for details and book you ticket today!

Cookbook Updates

oracle v0.0.9 - atomic-penguin

• Eric G. Wolfe’s oracle cookbook was recently updated. This cookbook configures the pre-requisites for Oracle DB systems. It does not install any components of Oracle, it simply prepares the system for Oracle.
• Recent changes fix possible metadata SNAFU for Rightscale

krb5 v0.0.2 - atomic-penguin

• Eric has also released a new cookbook, krb5, which installs and configures Kerberos version 5 authentication modules on RedHat and Debian family systems.

s3fs-fuse v0.0.7 - chrisroberts

• Chris Roberts released s3fs-fuse. This new cookbook installs and configures s3fs-fuse and provides optional mount monitoring via bluepill.
• This cookbook is for Ubuntu only at this time.

runlist_modifiers v0.1.0 - chrisroberts

• Chris also released a runlist_modifiers cookbook.
• This cookbook provides helpers to allow or disallow recipes from being loaded via the run list based on node attributes.

discovery v0.0.6 - fujin

• AJ Christensen released updates to the discovery cookbook. This cookbook installs and configures the discovery library that lets you search for nodes and lets you find an appropriate ipaddress for a node.

jenkins v0.6.3 - fujin

• AJ also released some updates to jenknis and pennyworth cookbooks.
• Installs and configures Jenkins CI server & slaves

pennyworth v0.2.3 - fujin

• Configures the pennyworth continuous deployment pipeline system

cpan v0.0.6 - melezhik

• Alexey Melezhik released updates to the cpan cookbook.
• The recent changes make improvements to the logs and after-install summary.

js v0.0.5 - melezhik

• Alexey also released a js cookbook which is a light weight resource for installing java script applications/libraries

rbenv v1.2.2 - reset

• Jamie Winsor made a bunch of updates to the rbenv cookbook and merged in contributions from Pierre Baillet
• The cookbook now supports ubuntu & debian,
• Installs an rbenv Ohai plugin onto the node to automatically populate attributes about the rbenv installation
• and includes updates based on suggestions made by foodcritic

gdash v0.0.1 - sme

• Sean Escriva published gdash, a cookbook to automatically deploy the Gdash web interface for Graphite.

mg v1.0.0 - sme

• Sean also published mg, a cookbook that installs the editor mg, a micro emacs clone, for when full blown emacs might be undesired.

minitest-handler v0.0.4 - btm

• Bryan McLellan released some update to the minitest-chef-handler cookbook.

isomounter v0.0.4 - cixelsyd

• steven c published a new cookbook, isomounter. This cookbook will installs and configure Magic Disc software to mount ISO files on windows machines

mosh v0.1.0 - jtimberman

• Joshua Timberman published mosh, a cookbook to install the mobile shell by the same name.
• Mosh is a remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.

jruby v0.2.3 - jlbfalcao

• Jorge Falcao updated the jruby cookbook with contributions from Michael van Rooijen
• JRuby 1.6.7 is now the default

percona-install v0.0.6 - nathenharvey

• The percona-install cookbook was updated thanks to some requests from Miah Johnson. The cookbook now installs Percona’s monitoring tools and xtrabackup.

psiprobe v0.1.4 - hasanb

• Hasan Bramwell has published the psiprobe cookbook.
• This is Hasan’s first cookbook on the community site and he’s really interested in hearing your comments and receiving pull requests.

redisio v1.0.1 - geekbri

• Brian Bianco has released a new redis cookbook named, “redisio”
• From what I can tell, there are now four different redis cookbooks on the community site:
  
  • redis-package from coderanger
  • redis from mrflip
  • redis2 from avishai
  • redisio from geekbri

Opscode Cookbook Releases

• apache2, v1.1.6
• database v1.2.0
• freebsd v0.0.2
• java v1.5.0
• nagios v1.2.6
• nginx v0.101.0
• postfix v.1.0.0
• sudo v1.1.0
• varnish v0.9.0

• OpenStack Design Summit & Conference San Francisco 4/16-4/20
• Bio-IT World Boston 4/24-4/26
• Cycle Computing & Grill(not Griddle)
• Eucalyptus Days NYC 4/25
• Interop Las Vegas 5/6-5/10
• ChefConf San Francisco 5/15-5/17 – keynotes will be streamed

• Bryan Berry bryan.berry@gmail.com, Twitter/IRC/GitHub: bryanwb, blog: http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com

• Matt Ray matt@opscode.com Twitter/IRC/GitHub: mattray blog: http://leastresistance.net

• Who Writes the Kernel (through 3.2): http://go.linuxfoundation.org/who-writes-linux-2012
• LTSI project (Long Term Support Initiative) http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/longterm-proposal-08-2011.html
• yocto project - toolkit for building embedded linux devices
• filesystems
• we have perf now, very nice
• oracle guys have dtrace running on Oracle linux
• zfs on linux, doesn’t know
• btrfs, excellent but user-space tools lagging
• both oracle and suse support btrfs
• xfs still kicking butt
• google runs whole infrastructure off ext4
• I/O - last year radical low-level file-level locking optimization w/ 3.x, much better perf
• fusionIO cards
• networking guys pushing 40GB throughput
• USB3
• hi-frequency trading systems, limited by hardware not linux
• linux able to drive as fast as your hardware can go
• for system smaller than a 32-bit cpu, don’t use linux, ecos
• Greg K-H inspired by BSD development, for some workloads is very competitive
• Greg K-H recommend sysadmins run Debian or Gentoo
• nasdaq all gentoo
• E*Trade all gentoo
• All high-frequency trading, run gentoo or debian
• To learn about the kernel you should
• read linux kernel in a nutshell, free and written by Greg K-H
• build your own kernel
• He is most excited about
• linux always evolving
• supporting new hw is exciting like rasperrypi and beagle board