CentOS Now

DRBD 8.3.12 for CentOS-5 in testing

2012-01-30T08:15:00.001-06:00

The ELRepo Project has DRBD packages for CentOS-5 and CentOS-6, named drbd83-utils or drbd84-utils. The CentOS Project does not want to maintain extra packages that exist in other places unless we need to change them ... so we are not going to create DRBD packages for CentOS-6.

Since CentOS-4 is being EOL'ed in less than a month, we are also not going to publish updates for the DRBD in CentOS-4.

This leaves the DRBD for CentOS-5 that are part of CentOS Extras. Since these have been released for CentOS-5, we will continue to maintain the DRBD version 8.3.x tree (drbd83) in CentOS Extras.

A new version of DRBD 8.3 (drbd83-8.3.12) has been released to the testing repository for CentOS-5. You can see the details here:

DRBD 8.3.12 for CentOS-5

If you want to use DRBD 8.4.x for CentOS-5, rather than releasing it separately, the CentOS Project recommends that you use drbd84-utils from ELRepo (linked above).

For users who want to use the drbd83-8.3.12 version ... please test the version that is currently in CentOS Testing and provide feedback. With enough feedback I will move the packages from testing to CentOS Extras.

CentOS in 2012

2012-01-03T05:42:00.003-06:00

The first thing I want to do is congratulate Karanbir and Tasha on the birth of their new baby girl Millie. She is the quite cute ... hello Millie :)

The CentOS Project has spent much time and effort into getting a new build system in place for CentOS 6 that can generate good and timely builds, as well as inform us of newly released upstream SRPMS and keep the CentOS QA team informed when we build any new packages.

The release of CentOS-6.2 on 12/20/2011, in less than 2 weeks and at the same time as Oracle's OEL as noted on Distrowatch, is where we would like to have all our future releases be. I think that we should see the standard 2-4 week time frame for point releases and within 24 hours for updates now that we have this new build system in place.

We have also put a Continuous Release (CR) repository in place for both CentOS 5 and CentOS 6. This repository can be installed via the simple command:

yum install centos-release-cr

The purpose of the CR repository is to allow the CentOS Project to push some of the security updates if we are having issues with a point release build (like we did with both CentOS-6.0 and CentOS-6.1). If we are not going to meet the 2-4 week goal for our point release, we will push out the packages we have gotten to build properly while continuing to work on the problem packages. This repository is totally optional and was not needed with CentOS-6.2, but we recommend it be installed if you want to get your security updates as fast as possible.

Karanbir gets the credit for the new build system, called reimzul. It uses beanstalkd work queues and allows adding new builders to process the work as required.

The build system has the flexibility to allow us to import SRPMS into a git repo for packages we want to change, generate a new SRPM after edits for those packages, and submit those modified SRPMS into the work queues. It also allows for the submission of non-modified SRPMS directly without the need to import them into git. It automates several things that we have done in the past by hand (automatically knowing which packages are not built by CentOS (for example the RHN packages that deal with upstream subscriptions) and automatically copies multilib 32bit packages into the 64 bit tree. The system also reliably produces the Yum-Presto DeltaRPMS and metadata for minimizing download times for updates.

We do need to announce that CentOS-4 will be reaching the End Of Life at the end of February 2012. That means that there will be no more CentOS-4 updates after March 1st, 2012. If you are still using CentOS-4, you need to upgrade to CentOS-5 or CentOS-6 or switch to Red Hat's paid Extended Update Support for EL4 to continue to get updates. Please see the CentOS-4 EOL announcement for more details.

So, news on the CentOS front for 2012 is very promising and we are looking forward to great things in the new year.

How the new Kernel SRPM distribution impacts CentOS

2011-03-08T18:55:00.000-06:00

There seem to be many different articles concerning how Red Hat has chosen to distribute its Kernel Source Code (SRPM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Here are a just a few of them:

Red Hat Fights Back

Why RHEL 6 Keeps Its Patches Under Its Hat

Is Red Hat violating the GPL?

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Red Hat has also responded in a couple of places, here are a few of those:

Commitment to Open

Red Hat: 'Yes, we undercut Oracle with hidden Linux patches

The first thing I want to make perfectly clear is that this blog post is MY OPINION and it is not an official statement of or by the CentOS Project.

Now that we have that out of the way, the first issue I want to address is the suggestion by ITWire that Red Hat is somehow violating the GPL by distributing their source package with the patches already rolled in. They are not, most companies distribute their source packages as tarballs with all the patches already rolled in. Some companies (but not all) also provide all the Software Change Management (SCM) commits in a public place (like a SVN, GIT or CVS repository). This is not required. What is required is what Red Hat is doing, providing the source code to their customers.

The other thing the ITWire article does is that they have a link to a Red Hat "Terms of Service" for their websites and portals along with the claim that the this is a restriction on the Red Hat customers ability to distribute software. The only problem is, the link ITWire pointed to says that software is controlled by a different agreement altogether. The above link is for Use of Content, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux software is actually governed by the EULA link here. If you look at that EULA, you can distribute the software per the license of each package as long as you meet the trademark and logo requirements. Nothing new to see here, software distributing same as before, no GPL violations, no problems.

The other question that people seem to have is will the new method of the kernel delivery somehow impact CentOS and its ability to get the releases out. It should have no impact on the main CentOS distribution at all. We have built the EL6 kernels for testing and there is no impact. Where there will be a slight impact is the CentOS Plus kernel (which is something CentOS provides as added functionality). The CentOS plus kernel sometimes adds patches to fix problems that are delayed in upstream engineering or things they choose not to fix in architectures that they do not support. These kind of changes will be harder to make because some of these patches normally need to be done in a specific order to get them to apply in the most efficient manner. Or we might want to back out a specific patch and replace it with a different one. These kind of things will now be much harder. Instead of backing out the patch, we will need to modify the patch to fit OVER the already rolled in source code from Red Hat. It will take longer, or we may not even offer this service for CentOS-6.

I certainly understand why Red Hat is taking the action they are taking, it is fully GPL compatible, and it should have minimal impact on the main CentOS distribution. The CentOS Project wants (and needs) Red Hat to continue to be the premiere paid Enterprise Linux distribution for the United States and the rest of the world. I personally would rather Red Hat did not deliver their kernel this way, but it does not seem to be a major issue to me. Which is why it seemed to take 4 months before many people even noticed.

CPanel Conference 09

2009-10-02T07:20:00.000-05:00

Looks like I might be able to work out all the last minute details and make it to the CPanel Conference 09 in Houston, Texas next week (5th, 6th and 7th of October, 2009).

Karanbir and his wife are flying over from London to make the event. We are also possibly going to have some kind of CentOS social event or meeting on the October 8th, so if you are in Houston and might like to do something like that then contact me or Karanbir on IRC (freenode, #centos-social) or e-mail.

I am really looking forward to seeing Karanbir in person for the first time and meeting his wife. I am also looking forward to meeting Garry Dale, who is helping at the event and pretty much put most of this together.

Heck, I might even get a haircut and trim up the beard for this :D

i586 installs for CentOS 4.8

2009-09-02T07:56:00.000-05:00

The CentOS 4.8 i386 install media has an option for the older i586 processors, as well as the normal i686 installer. The only problem is that the i586 kernels are broken on the released install media for CentOS 4.8.

If you need i586 install media, you can download them from here.

Since the upstream product on which CentOS is based does not support i586, we decided to fix the issues and release an i586 installer separately so as not to impact the already released products. One of the main reasons we do not want to change the OS directory to be different than the released ISOs is that we know some people use jigdo (and probably other things) to create installable media from the mirror trees instead of downloading both the trees and the DVD, etc.

Because of the need to keep the OS directory for 4.8 the same as the original install media, if you want to use the new i586 media to do a network install, you will need to create your own tree and publish it (you can mount and publish the i586 install DVD for this), or you can install from:

http://i586.centos.org/centos/4/os/i386/

FreeNX and NX updates

2009-08-31T11:31:00.001-05:00

There are now posted to CentOS Extras for CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 new packages for NX (nx-3.3.0-14) and FreeNX (freenx-0.7.3-2).

NX is an enterprise-class solution for secure remote access, desktop virtualization, and hosted desktop deployment built around the self-designed and self-developed NX suite of components. Please see the NoMachine web site for more information about the NX libraries.

FreeNX is a GPL implementation of the NX Server and NX Client Components. See the FreeNX website for more information.

The NX packages in CentOS Extras are built from the OSS sources from NoMachine and provide the NX libraries, and the FreeNX packages provide the required server software to use the NX libraries.

CentOS also provides an NX client called QtNX (qtnx-0.9.0-3), but only for CentOS 5.

See the CentOS Wiki for information on using NX and FreeNX on CentOS.

DRBD packages in CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 to be updated

2009-08-29T14:58:00.000-05:00

The DRBD packages in CentOS 4 and CentOS 5 will soon be updated. Each CentOS version has two DRBD versions.

CentOS 4 DRBD

Version 0.7.25
CentOS 4 currently contains DRBD 0.7.25 (which it was released with) and the newer DRBD 8.2.6. There will be 2 upgrades to CentOS 4. The first is that a new kernel module for DRBD 0.7.25 will be released that is kABI based. This means that you will be able to use it on multiple kernels, and not need to reinstall it. The packages will be kmod-drbd-0.7.25-4.el4 and should be a direct replacement for the current kmods if you are using version 0.7.25 of DRBD.

I recommend that if you are using this version if DRBD, you upgrade it to DRBD 8.3.2 or higher instead. The upgrade from DRBD 0.7.x to DRBD 8.3.x is not trivial, however there is no longer any support for DRBD 0.7.x from Linbit, so I would recommend and upgrade after CentOS releases the 8.3.x version discussed below, that you upgrade to 8.3.x.

Here is an article from Florian Haas on upgrading from version 0.7 to 8.2 (or greater) DRBD.

Version 8.3.x
Currently CentOS 4 also contains version 8.2.6 of DRBD with newer versions of DRBD in the Testing Repo.

Linbit, the upstream provider of DRBD, has released a new 8.3.x tree and they are no longer maintaining the 8.2.x tree. The upgrade from 8.2.x to 8.3.x is not hard and can be done live, so CentOS will release a version 8.3.x DRBD update that replaces 8.2.x

If you planning new DRBD installations, please use 8.3.2 or later versions and not 8.2.x or 0.7.25 versions.

Upgrading from 8.2.x to 8.3.x
When upgrading from DRBD from 8.2.x to 8.3.x (and even when doing a 8.3.x to another newer 8.3.x) you should handle this upgrade a little differently than normal machine updates. Here is a basic outline of how to do the upgrade:

1. Login to your Secondary Node. Verify this is your secondary node with the command service drbd status.

2. Upgrade everything expect your kernel, DRBD and heartbeat. You likely (or at least should) have heartbeat, drbd, kmod-drbd and kernel excluded from your current updates. If you do, then just a the command yum upgrade. If you do not have the above files excluded, this command should work:

yum --exclude="kernel* heartbeat* drbd* kmod-drbd*" upgrade

3. Turn off heartbeat on the secondary node with the command service heartbeat stop. Check your primary node, it should still be running heartbeat and DRBD. The secondary node should only be running DRBD.

4. Turn off DRBD with the command service drbd stop. At this point, you do not have DRBD running on the secondary node.

5. Remove the current kmod that you have installed ... this command should do it: rpm -e kmod-drbd82. (substitute drbd83 for drbd82 if you are doing an inplace upgrade of drbd83)

6. Install the latest CentOS kernel on your machine. If you remove the exclusions in your CentOS-Base.repo file, you can do this with the command yum upgrade kernel\*

7. Install the upgraded drbd83 and kmod-drbd83 with the command yum install drbd83 kmod-drbd83. Note: you may need to substitute upgrade for install if this is an inplace upgrade of drbd83.

8. You will now likely need to reboot on the new kernel, but you do not want drbd and heartbeat to start up on the reboot, so for now do these commands chkconfig heartbeat off AND chkconfig drbd off. Reboot your secondary node machine and log back into it.

9. At this point, you should be running the new kernel and have the new drbd installed. Try starting the drbd with the command service drbd start. Now check the drbd status with the command service drbd status ... the secondary node should be up and running in secondary mode. Once it is also consistent, you should be able to start heartbeat with the command service heartbeat start. Check your /etc/log/ha-log to verify heartbeat is back in secondary mode. Also check heartbeat is running with service heartbeat status

10. If everything is working, turn on heartbeat and drbd to start on boot with the commands:

chkconfig drbd on
chkconfig heartbeat on

11. You should now have your secondary DRBD node back to normal. You should be able to now to login to your primary node and turn off heartbeat on it and have the secondary node pick up as primary using the command service heartbeat stop on your primary node.

12. You should now have your Normal SECONDARY NODE as your current primary and normal primary node as a DRBD secondary with heartbeat turned off. If that is the case, you should be able to upgrade the primary node using steps 2-11 above (skipping step 3) ... substituting primary node for secondary node in the instructions.

Note: When you start heartbeat on the normal primary node, all the loads will move from the secondary mode to the primary mode, so make sure DRBD is running properly before restarting heatbeat on the primary node.

CentOS 5 DRBD

Version 8.0.16
CentOS 5 currently contains DRBD 8.0.x (which it was released with) and DRBD newer 8.2.6.

DRBD 8.0.x is the stable tree, and if you want to use it, it is currently supported. Version 8.0.16 will be released as part of this update. The basic steps to upgrade will be the same as in the procedure above, substituting drbd and drbd-kmod for drbd82 or drbd83.

As long as LinBit supports the 8.0.x tree, CentOS will do the same.

Version 8.3.x
All of the information in the CentOS 4 Version 8.3.x section is applicable to CentOS 5 as well.

The upgrade outline is also the same.

The updates should be released in the next week, so be looking for them on or before Saturday, September 5th, 2009.

CSGFS for CentOS 4 updated

2009-08-29T12:19:00.000-05:00

The CSGFS (Cluster Suite / Global File System) repository for CentOS 4 has been updated after the release of CentOS 4.8.

All the latest Source files have been built and added to the repository.

There is one known problem of Missing SRPMS for lvm2-cluster.

A bug has been filed upstream asking for the release of this SRPM. In the mean time, you need to run a lesser version of lvm2 from the main CentOS-4 repository on your Cluster servers.

CentOS 4.8 is released

2009-08-23T17:28:00.000-05:00

My name is Johnny Hughes. I am one of the lead developers at the CentOS Project, which releases the Linux operating system called CentOS. I am currently the Project Lead on the CentOS-4 version of the distribution.

The current release of CentOS 4 is version 4.8 which was released on August, 21st 2009.

CentOS 4 will be supported with security updates until February 29, 2012, although if you are planning a new deployment you should probably use the latest version of CentOS, currently CentOS 5. CentOS rebuilds sources from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and will release updates as long as they are released upstream. For Red Hat's policies and lifetimes, please see this link.

If you are looking for help with CentOS please see Getting Help on the CentOS Wiki.