Lenz Grimmer's blog

Please note that I won't be updating this blog anymore. I will keep the content around for the time being, but future posts will only appear on the new site. I tried to articulate my reasons for doing so in my post Why the switch to a new blog?

I'm happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.16. The source package is now available for download from http://lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/ and https://launchpad.net/mylvmbackup.

Installation packages for a number of platforms can be obtained from the openSUSE Build Service.

Version 0.16 adds support for sending out SNMP traps in case of backup successes or failures. I'd like to thank Alexandre Anriot for contributing this new feature and his patience with me.

Please see the ChangeLog and bzr history for more details.

The annual GUUG Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2014 will take place in two weeks from now, from September 23.-26. at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.

The agenda is packed with interesting sessions covering a wide range of topics relevant to developers and system administrators. In addition to the regular talks, the first two days provide day-long tutorials to get a deep-dive into interesting technologies like OpenStack, Puppet, secure web development or setting up file services.

I'll be speaking about reStructuredText and Sphinx, a very powerful framework for writing technical documentation.

Register now!

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!

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.

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.

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):

• 11:00-11:45: Paketmanagement auf Oracle Linux mit RPM und yum
• 16:00-16:45: Snapshots, Checksummen, RAID: eine Einführung in das Btrfs-Dateisystem

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:

• 15:20-16:05 The Btrfs Linux file system - Overview

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:

• Hands-on Lab: Getting Started with Linux Containers on Oracle Linux
• Talk: Using Oracle Linux As Your Development Platform
• Talk: Oracle Linux Technical Deep Dive: Reliability, Availability, and Scalability

I just published the second part of a blog post series about Linux Containers on the OTN Garage blog (where a lot of my recent blogging takes place nowadays) — check it out if you would like to get an introduction and some quick examples on how to get started with this technology on Oracle Linux (and other Linux distributions that support Linux Containers, of course):

• Linux-Containers — Part 1: Overview
• Linux Container (LXC) — Part 2: Working With Containers

German versions of these articles are also available from the OLIVI_DE - Oracle LInux und VIrtualisierung blog:

• Linux-Container (LXC) — Teil 1: Überblick
• Linux Container (LXC) — Teil 2: Arbeiten mit Containern

We also recorded a short whiteboard session about this topic a while ago — the video is available from the Oracle Linux YouTube channel: Linux Containers Explained

It's my great pleasure to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.14.

This release includes a large number of improvements, code cleanups, and new functionality.

I would like to thank Ask Bjørn Hansen, Ben Bonnel, Norbert Tretkowski, Neil Wilson, Klaus Ethgen and Alexandre Anriot for their feedback and contributions to this release.

The release is available as a source tarball and generic RPM package. Packages for other distributions are available from the openSUSE Build Service.

Some notable highlights from the ChangeLog (please check the bzr commit log for a more detailed history of changes):

• Improved error handling: send out an email if mail_report_on has been set to "errors" and a log message with log level LOG_ERR was logged.
• Abort and clean up if the snapshot volume could not be mounted
• Abort and clean up if the backup creation failed
• Exit with a non-zero return code if errorstate was set
• Enabled timestr() formatting sequences for snapshot volume names, to create snapshot names which contain a dynamic date value. This can be useful when thin provisioned snapshots are used as the actual backup by enabling the keep_snapshot option
• Added "thin" option to mylvmbackup.conf (default=0), to enable thin provisioned LVM snapshots
• Added new configuration option "recoveryopts" that allows to modify the command line options that are passed to the MySQL instance that performs the InnoDB recovery (BUG#544295 and BUG#1091950). The current default options are "--skip-networking --skip-grant --bootstrap --skip-syslog --skip-slave-start" (which better accommodates MySQL 5.1)
• Merged patches from Alexandre Anriot to provide a mail reporting method which sends the log output via email and a new "purge" action that allows to only keep a defined number of backups in the backup directory
• Applied patch contributed by Klaus Ethgen that removes the annoying LVM warnings about a leaked file descriptor (DBD:mysql does not add FD_CLOEXEC on the MySQL socket)
• BUG#1086313: mvlvmbackup lacks support for 'thin' LVM snapshots (Thanks to Neil Wilson for the patch)
• BUG#787063: Ensure to clean up temporary .pos files when the snapshot mount is kept, too
• Applied small patch from Norbert Tretkowski: change umask to 077 before creating the tarball backup files to prevent them from being readable by everyone
• BUG#593220: Fixed the compressarg option for cat (removed the comment)
• Applied patch contributed by Ben Bonnel to add a new configuration option "rsnaprsyncarg" that allows one to pass special options to the rsync process when using the rsnap backend.
• Applied patch provided by Ask Bjørn Hansen to allow targets not to have a timestamp (e.g. for rsync targets)

I feel like I just got back home from Oracle OpenWorld (check out my pictures) and some vacation, but I'll be on the road again next week to attend LinuxCon Europe in Barcelona. I'll be there from Monday (Nov. 5th) until Wednesday evening. Oracle is sponsoring the event and we'll have a booth at the exhibition area (booth #19), handing out free Oracle Linux and Oracle VM DVDs. I'll be at the booth every now and then and plan to give a short introduction and live demo of Ksplice rebootless updates on Monday evening (6:00pm).

Two colleagues and myself will also give some presentations:

• Status of Linux Tracing - Elena Zannoni, Oracle - Tue 6th, 14:20
• OCFS2: Status and Overview - Lenz Grimmer, Oracle - Wed 7th, 10:40
• MySQL Security Model and pluggable authentication - Kristofer Pettersson, Oracle - Wed 7th, 13:50

I look forward to meeting many people I still know from the SuSE days and to learn more about what's new in Linux - the schedule looks very promising and it will be a tough challenge to pick the right talks. And if you happen to be in Barcelona these days, I'd like to recommend two related events:

• On Monday evening (Nov. 5th, 8:00pm), there will be a "Cluster / Storage / HA Geek Dinner" which I plan to attend. Please get in touch with Florian Haas directly for an invite to the Google+ Event. Thanks to Florian and Lars Marowsky-Brée for setting this up!
• A week later, on Tuesday (Nov. 13th, 7:00pm), there will be a MySQL community event "State of the art in MySQL high availability and replication", including a presentation on the topic by Robert Hodges and Giuseppe Maxia from Continuent, followed by a networking event including beer and snacks.

I wish I could attend that second one as well, but I'll hopefully be back at home by then again...

UPDATE 2012-10-30: The direct link to Google+ Event did not work -  Sorry for the inconvenience. Updated the RSVP instructions accordingly.

It's that time of the year again — the summer holidays are over and the conference season starts!

I'm very excited to be at Oracle Open World in San Francisco again, where I will pretty busy. On Saturday and Sunday I will attend MySQL Connect, primarily to man the Oracle Linux booth in the exhibition area. But I hope to catch some of the talks as well (I shared my favourite sessions with Keith Larson from the MySQL team in this interview). During Open World, I will help out manning the Oracle Linux demo pods in the exhibition grounds in Moscone South, where we will showcase Oracle Linux with Ksplice and related technologies. I also have a joint presentation with two of our customers about "Top Technical Tips for Automatic and Secure Oracle Linux Deployments" and I've prepared two hands-on lab sessions "Oracle Linux Storage Management with LVM and Device-Mapper" and "Oracle Linux Package Management: Configuring and Enabling Services". Both hands-on lab sessions will actually be run twice. The lab sessions were quite popular last year, I look forward to moderating these again.

In November, I'll be at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to give a joint presentation with my colleague Manuel Hossfeld about "Oracle Linux - best practices and benefits" (in German). We also plan to request a slot for a BOF/Unconference about Linux, I'm curious about the feedback and discussions that will arise during these sessions.

If you happen to be around these conferences and would like to meet, please get in touch!

It took me several attempts, but this blog is finally reachable via both http://www.lenzg.net/ and http://www.lenzg.org/ directly again. I had some trouble migrating the .org domain name to my new hosting company, but it's finally done. So now lenzg.org is no longer doing a http redirect, but will serve these pages directly!

Now I only need to get back to blogging more often here - a lot of my writing activity is currently done elsewhere...

It's conference time again – next week I'll be attending the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg, to speak about Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel on Tuesday, 12:00 and the OCFS2 cluster file system on Thursday, 13:00.

In addition to that, me and my colleague Manuel Hossfeld will host an Unconference Session about Oracle Linux and the UEK. The rest of the time I'll be manning a demo pod at our booth and try to attend some sessions myself – the conference program looks very promising!

Last week we concluded our first Oracle Technology Network Sys Admin Day in Sacramento (CA). Well, it was actually the second Sys Admin Day, but the first one that had two parallel tracks of sessions about both Oracle Linux and Oracle Solaris.

I helped preparing for the event by creating the Linux lab handbook as well as the VirtualBox appliance of Oracle Linux 6.1 that was used for the exercises. Unfortunately I could not be there in person, but it would have been pointless for me to go on an intercontinental flight just for one day.

From the feedback we've received so far, the attendees really enjoyed the event and were positively surprised about the depth and quality of the practical hands-on lab sessions.

If you've missed the first one and happen to live somewhere in the Seattle area, you have another chance to attend OTN sysadmin day: we'll be hosting another one on Thursday, September 22nd at The Westin Seattle (1900 5th Ave., Seattle, WA 98101). Again, attendance is free, all you need to bring is your own laptop with VirtualBox installed. We'll provide the rest. Space is limited — you can review the agenda and register here!