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xtrabackup for MySQL

October 14th, 2012 by

If you run data-driven applications like me, you are probably already running some kind of backup and have plans for disaster recovery. I hope you are not still using SQL dumps?

I have been using Percona XtraBackup professionally for MySQL backups for a while now. Especially if your database access is highly transactional you will find it useful that you can get consistent non-blocking, non-purging backups while continuing to serve transactions. Who wants downtime anyway?

Under the hood the software will take a dirty copy of the InnoDB tablespaces on disk, and extract binary logs required to bring all of these to a specific point in time, or rather LSN, using a patched version of the mysqld binary. The preparation / restore requires applying the binary log to the files which results in MySQL tablespaces and binary log files equivalent to how they would have been with a clean MySQL shutdown.

Mixing transactional with non-transactional database engines is possible if you are willing to accept some blocking time while backing them up. If you are using MySQL replication, you can also use this to create a new slave from either a master or to clone a slave from another without downtime of either.

The upgrade to the 2.0 series adds, among other things, parallel IO and parallel compression. This requires a new streaming file format xbstream in addition the previous tar. Think of it as a tar with multiple input pipes.

I added the xtrabackup package to openSUSE, it is available in the server:database project (repo, SLE 11) right now and will also be part of the next openSUSE release.

Remember that these are only tools. Love your data and protect your business. A copy is not a backup. A backup that isn’t monitored for success is not a backup. A backup that is not proven to restore successfully is barely a backup.

Contact me if you need help setting this up.

Posted in Packaging, Server | Comments Off

Run X2go thin-client using kiwi-ltsp

September 27th, 2012 by

Recently, came across x2go packages maintained by Jan Engelhardt for openSUSE and other distributions on open build service. As openSUSE Education Li-f-e has great LTSP integration thanks to KIWI-LTSP, I decided to check out how x2go can fit in with this existing thin-client computing solution.

“x2go is an open (GPL/AGPL) source “server based computing” project. Combining the advantages of existing systems it features ease of use, performance and scalability. x2go provides you with access to your desktop – from within your own network and via the internet. x2go is not limited to particular hardware, it supports a variety of devices and architectures.” -from their website.

Some of the features/benefits of x2go that are not available on LTSP are:

* Remote login from within local lan and internet from any OS
* Session persistence, you can disconnect session from one client and continue where you left off from any other client
* Low bandwidth usage
* Session sharing with other users
(more…)

Posted in Build Service, Derivative, Desktop, Education, Network, Server, Systems Management | Comments Off

Announcing the release of openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.2

September 14th, 2012 by

openSUSE Education team once again presents Li-f-e (Linux for Education) built on hot new openSUSE 12.2 including all the post release updates. As always this edition of Li-f-e comes bundled with a lot of softwares useful for students, teachers, as well as IT admins of educational institutions. Apart from stable versions of KDE and Gnome, Cinnamon is also available.Sugar desktop suite makes a comeback thanks to the work of Xin Wang packaging it. Li-f-e also give full multimedia experience right out of the box without having to install anything extra. The live installable DVD iso stands at 3.3G as an incredible array of softwares from open source world are available on it, we have not just bundled them in, but have tried to integrate it with the distribution to give everything a seamless feel.

(more…)

Posted in Derivative, Desktop, Distribution, Education, Server, Systems Management | 6 Comments »

Testing LTSP on openSUSE 12.2

August 23rd, 2012 by

With openSUSE 12.2 almost here, we have been working hard to get LTSP experience on this release better than ever. Thanks to the power of KIWI and some great scripting by Alex Savin, KIWI-LTSP has a lot of new features and improvements.

Here is how to get started:

(more…)

Posted in Desktop, Education, openSUSE 11.2, Server, Systems Management | 1 Comment »

How to peek into remote isos

July 17th, 2012 by

When people want to provide a collection of files, they sometimes choose to do so by providing a .iso image file. But if you only want to look what files are in there or only need a few files, e.g. kernel and initrd for PXE-booting, you still had to download the whole thing to loop-mount it.

But you don’t have to anymore. Because modern web servers support delivering only parts of a file (using the “Range” header field), that allowed me to implement curlwwwfs that mounts remote HTTP directories into your local filesystem. And then you can use fuseiso on top to access the actual content within the .iso. All without root access.

This is how it works:

First you have to install the required packages (replace 12.2 with your version of openSUSE (or if you use a different Linux distribution, do git clone git://github.com/bmwiedemann/curlwwwfs and “make install” in there)):

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/bmwiedemann/openSUSE_12.2/home:bmwiedemann.repo

zypper in curlwwwfs fuseiso

# Then you start it:

mkdir mnthttp mntiso

curlwwwfs http://zq1.de/bootcd mnthttp &

ls -la mnthttp/

fuseiso mnthttp/bmwinux-8.2-040808.iso mntiso

cat mntiso/isolinux/isolinux.cfg

# and later you clean it up with

fusermount -u mntiso

fusermount -u mnthttp

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Posted in Apache, Network | 1 Comment »

CLI to upload image to openstack cloud

April 18th, 2012 by

I work on automatic testing of one of our products that creates other projects.
And because there is a lot of clouds everywhere I want to use them too. We
have internally an OpenStack cloud (still Diablo release). So I need to solve
automatic uploading of images built in the Build Service. Below I describe my working version.

(more…)

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Posted in Programming, Quality Assurance, Uncategorized, Virtualization | Comments Off

new package postgresql-plr. Get the power of R inside your postgreSQL database

March 30th, 2012 by

I’m pleased to introduce you to a new available package for postgreSQL database.
The R procedural language extension developed by Joseph E Conway.

R Procedural Language for PostgreSQL

Introduction

PL/R is a library which allow you to add the power of R statistical engine in your database.
This article will show you how to add it and basic usage on a 12.1 installation.
(The package is also available for 11.4)

Become familiar with the project and how it can help you.
The homepage project : www.joeconway.com/plr/

We admit here, that you are able to manage a posgreSQL server instance, and have already one running.
(more…)

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Posted in Packaging, Server, Uncategorized | Comments Off

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e 12.1 out now!

December 22nd, 2011 by

openSUSE Education team is proud to present another edition of openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 12.1. Li-f-e comes loaded with everything that students, parents, teachers and system admins of educational institutions may need.

  more screenshots…

(more…)

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Posted in Apache, Derivative, Desktop, Distribution, Education, GNOME, KDE, Programming, Samba, Server, Virtualization | Comments Off

new package squidview available

July 17th, 2011 by

squidview

squidview is one of the software, I’ve always build and installed on each squid proxy server I build for me or customers. It’s small, stable, and usefull. So it was a clear real nice candidate to be use to improve my obs and packager skiil.
I would like to thanks T1loc, yaloki, mrdocs, coolo, alin, and all others great packagers around, for helping and teaching me during the process.

Introduction

Squidview is an interactive console program which monitors and displays squid logs in a nice fashion, and may then go deeper with searching and reporting functions.

(If you don’t know what squid is or does this program is probably not for you.)

To use squidview you must at least have read access to squid’s access.log file. You may need to see your administrator for this. Squidview uses this text log file for all operations. It does not generate its own database for tasks.

homepage www.rillion.net/squidview

Features

Squidview has a number of functions. Navigate the log file with the cursor pad keys, jump to a certain day or switch to a different log file. Search for text or large http/ftp requests.

Put squidview into monitor mode: see the latest activity updated every 3 seconds (this is light on cpu load).

Reports can be generated listing the heavist Internet users and the most popular visited sites. See how many cache hits squid makes to save network traffic.

Squidview is released under the GPL.

Examples / Usage

The selected line shows a request made for a .gif at the shown time. As luck would have it, the 'H' indicates a cache hit :) In this mode user traffic can scroll by.

What the above would be if viewed with less.

A tally of all users against the bandwidth they used. Kept current in near real time.

A quick investigation into the recent history of one user.

Installation / Repositories

I’ve just made a submit request against openSUSE_Factory to get it included directly, but in the meantime, you could install it from the repository server:proxy as many other useful & related packages

For example adding the repository under openSUSE_Factory

zypper ar -c -f -n "server:proxy" http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:/proxy/openSUSE_Factory "server:proxy"
zypper in squidview

Builds available for :

The package is build successfully against : SLES10, SLES11, openSUSE 11.3 to Factory

Have Fun!

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Posted in Network, Packaging, Server, Systems Management | Comments Off

1-2-3 Cloud

June 20th, 2011 by

Towards the end of last year there was an article in openSUSE news “announcing” the cloud efforts in the openSUSE project and on OBS. Well, cloud is still all the rage (see Jos’ contribution to openSUSE News issue 180) and people just cannot stop talking about cloud computing.

Using openSUSE as a host for your cloud infrastructure is also making great progress. We have 3 cloud projects in OBS and hopefully these cover your favorite cloud infrastructure code, Virtualization:Cloud:Eucalyptus, Virtualization:Cloud:OpenNebula, and Virtualization:Cloud:OpenStack. The projects provide repositories for Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and OpenStack, respectively.

We attempt to make it relatively easy to get a cloud up and running. In this process OpenNebula and OpenStack have progressed the most. Eucalyptus is working, but due to an issue with Eucalyptus and openSSL 1.0 and later (the version in openSUSE) automation has to wait until these issues are resolved.

For OpenNebula we now have a KIWI example that shows how one can get a cloud setup from scratch in less than 2 hours, including the image build. The example contains a firstboot workflow for the head node, and self configuration of cloud nodes.

For OpenStack SUSE Gallery images are in the works and will be published in the near future.

All repositories provide packages you can install on running openSUSE systems. If you are interested in using openSUSE as the underlying OS for your cloud or if you want to contribute to the cloud projects, subscribe to the cloud mailing list opensuse-cloud@opensuse.org

Posted in Build Service, Infrastructure, Packaging, Programming, Virtualization | Comments Off

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