I’m diving into Kubernetes for a couple of months now. Discovering the possibilities and philosophy behind the hype definitely changed my mind. Yes, it is huge (in every sense ;) ) and it does change the way we, ex-sysops / ops / syasdmins do our work. Not tomorrow, not soon, now.
I’ve had my hands on various managed kubernetes clusters like GKE (Google Container Engine), EKS (AWS Elastic Container Service) or the more humble minikube but I’m not happy when I don’t understand what a technology is made of.
Debian
Yeah well, it happened. In my last post I was excited to get back to a BSD UNIX (FreeBSD) for my laptop, I thought I had fought the worse when rebuilding kernel and world in order to have a working DRM module for the Intel Iris 6100 that is bundled with this MacBook Pro generation. But I was wrong. None of the BSDs around had support for the BCM43602 chip that provides WiFi to the laptop.
Not so long ago, I wrote about using pkgsrc on Debian GNU/Linux, and assumed you’d start an installed service using rc.d. When I setup the new iMil.net server, I decided to give a try to kvm as it is easier to maintain, has good performances (sometimes better than Xen), nice administration tools, plus NetBSD now has a good VirtIO driver but no PVHVM support yet.
The first thing I do when setting up a Debian Jessie server is getting rid of systemd, whose philosophy and quality don’t match my personnal taste; but in that case, I wanted to use libvirtd so I could manage my virtual machines with virt-manager, and as a matter of fact, libvirtd has a hard dependency on systemd.
If you recently tried to install NetBSD 7.0 using Linux KVM you might have encountered the following failure:
This bug have been recently fixed on the 7-branch but the official ISO images are not yet updated, so you’ll have to use NetBSD daily builds mini-ISO which includes Christos fix to bus_dma.c
For the record, here’s the virt-install command I use:
sudo virt-install --virt-type kvm --name korriban --ram 4096 --disk path=/dev/vms/korriban,bus=virtio --vcpus 2 --network bridge:br0,model=virtio --graphics vnc --accelerate --noautoconsole --cdrom /home/imil/iso/boot.
While I tend to appreciate debian GNU/Linux, its tendency to be quite late on software versionning is sometimes annoying. Also, as a pkgsrc developer, I am used to have greater control over the packages I install, for example regarding the options I’d like to include.
For these reasons and a couple more, I sometimes choose to use pkgsrc along with apt to deal with particular packages. In this article, I’ll show how to achieve that task.
My “mediacenter”, a small x86 machine plugged to the living-room TV was a diskless (PXE/NFS root) Debian Wheezy until the past week end. After having tried Linux Mint on a laptop of mine and being impressed by its integration quality, I decided to migrate my mediacenter to LMDE.
I did not reinstalled the system, mainly because Mint does not support debootstrap, instead I followed a couple of HOWTOs I found on their forums: this one and this one.
At ${DAYWORK}, I happen to use IBM’s cloud: SoftLayer. It has all the features you’d expect from such a platform, and can instantiate pretty much any major GNU/Linux distribution you’d think of; but here’s the thing, we also use NetBSD for some infrastructure services, and as you’d guess, there’s no NetBSD support at all on SoftLayer.
I had to reverse some bits of their provisioning system to understand how to achieve NetBSD installation, but most of all, automatic provisioning.
I recently had the need to mount an UFS2 (NetBSD) partition under GNU/Linux, and while this is surprising, a standard Linux distro, Debian in my case, is not able to mount it in read/write mode.
I came across this project https://github.com/DanielO/fuse-ufs2 which has basic UFS2 read/write support. It is not very stable, I made it crash a couple of times while using vim on the mounted partition, but it does support simple operations like cp, rm and such.
Update
As written on the comments: _ Colin Watson Says: May 17th, 2013 at 7:12 pm
I uploaded 6.2 packages to Debian a week or so after you posted this, so you can/should now just use those instead. I expect they should build fine on wheezy. _
As a matter of fact, the following is now deprecated
At ${DAYWORK}, we used to have our own OpenSSH debian package which included the famous OpenSSH LPK patch, which permits the use of an OpenLDAP server as an SSH public key provider.
Upgrade de ma bonne vieille tatooine de squeeze en wheezy terminé. Modulo quelques soucis de polices, ça s’est plutôt bien passé. Il y a bien ce vieux message de grub:
Mais les réponses sur les MLs sont laconiques et surtout, cela n’empêche nullement grub de fonctionner puisque mon /boot est un soft RAID sur des partitions physiques, sans LVM. Merci past-iMil. Comme cette machine était la dernière affublée d’un bureau gnome 2 et qu’il était simplement inenvisageable de basculer au monstre gnome 3, elle aussi a migré vers XFCE (4.