CentOS Atomic Host 7.1906 Available for Download

Wednesday , 10, July 2019 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1906), an operating system designed to run Linux containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

  • atomic-1.22.1-26.gitb507039.el7.centos.x86_64
  • rpm-ostree-client-2018.5-2.atomic.el7.x86_64
  • ostree-2018.5-1.el7.x86_64
  • cloud-init-18.2-1.el7.centos.2.x86_64
  • docker-1.13.1-96.gitb2f74b2.el7.centos.x86_64
  • kernel-3.10.0-957.21.3.el7.x86_64
  • podman-1.3.2-1.git14fdcd0.el7.centos.x86_64
  • flannel-0.7.1-4.el7.x86_64
  • etcd-3.3.11-2.el7.centos.x86_64

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, or qcow2 image. For links to media, see the CentOS wiki.

Upgrading

If you’re running a previous version of CentOS Atomic Host, you can upgrade to the current image by running the following command:

# atomic host upgrade

Release Cycle

The CentOS Atomic Host image follows the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host cadence. After sources are released, they’re rebuilt and included in new images. After the images are tested by the SIG and deemed ready, we announce them.

Getting Involved

CentOS Atomic Host is produced by the CentOS Atomic SIG, based on upstream work from Project Atomic. If you’d like to work on testing images, help with packaging, documentation – join us!

You’ll often find us in #atomic and/or #centos-devel if you have questions. You can also join the atomic-devel mailing list if you’d like to discuss the direction of Project Atomic, its components, or have other questions.

Getting Help

If you run into any problems with the images or components, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list.

Have questions about using Atomic? See the atomic mailing list or find us in the #atomic channel on Freenode.

IBM, Red Hat, and CentOS

Tuesday , 9, July 2019 Rich Bowen announcement 1 Comment

CentOS community,

Today marks a new day in the 26-year history of Red Hat. IBM has finalized its acquisition of Red Hat which will operate as a distinct unit within IBM moving forward.

What does this mean for Red Hat’s contributions to the CentOS project?

In short, nothing.

Red Hat always has and will continue to be a champion for open source and projects like CentOS. IBM is committed to Red Hat’s independence and role in open source software communities so that we can continue this work without interruption or changes.

Our mission, governance, and objectives remain the same. We will continue to execute the existing project roadmap. Red Hat associates will continue to contribute to the upstream in the same ways they have been. And, as always, we will continue to help upstream projects be successful and contribute to welcoming new members and maintaining the project.

We will do this together, with the community, as we always have.

If you have questions or would like to learn more about today’s news, I encourage you to review the list of materials below. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright will host an online Q&A session in the coming days where you can ask questions you may have about what the acquisition means for Red Hat and our involvement in open source communities. Details will be announced on the Red Hat blog

More info:

Press release

Chris Wright blog - Red Hat and IBM: Accelerating the adoption of open source

FAQ on Red Hat Community Blog

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1905.01)

Sunday , 7, July 2019 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement 5 Comments

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.10 and CentOS Linux 7.6.1810 for x86_64. All included packages have been updated to May 30th, 2019.

Known Issues

  1. The VirtualBox Guest Additions are not preinstalled; if you need them for shared folders, please install the vagrant-vbguest plugin and add the following line to your Vagrantfile: 
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", type: "virtualbox"

    We recommend using NFS instead of VirtualBox shared folders if possible; you can also use the vagrant-sshfs plugin, which, unlike NFS, works on all operating systems.

  2. Since the Guest Additions are missing, our images are preconfigured to use rsync for synced folders. Windows users can either use SMB for synced folders, or disable the sync directory by adding the line 
    config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true

    to their Vagrantfile, to prevent errors on "vagrant up".

  3. Installing open-vm-tools is not enough for enabling shared folders with Vagrant’s VMware provider. Please follow the detailed instructions in https://github.com/mvermaes/centos-vmware-tools
  4. Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. We don't have access to any Windows computer, but some people reported that adding the following line to the Vagrantfile fixed the problem: 
    vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

Recommended Setup on the Host

Our automatic testing is running on a CentOS Linux 7 host, using Vagrant 1.9.4 with vagrant-libvirt and VirtualBox 5.1.20 (without the Guest Additions) as providers. We strongly recommend using the libvirt provider when stability is required.

Downloads

The official images can be downloaded from Vagrant Cloud. We provide images for HyperV, libvirt-kvm, VirtualBox and VMware.

If you never used our images before:

vagrant box add centos/6 # for CentOS Linux 6, or...
vagrant box add centos/7 # for CentOS Linux 7

Existing users can upgrade their images:

vagrant box update --box centos/6
vagrant box update --box centos/7

Verifying the integrity of the images

The SHA256 checksums of the images are signed with the CentOS 7 Official Signing Key. First, download and verify the checksum file:

$ curl http://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/sha256sum.txt.asc -o sha256sum.txt.asc
$ gpg --verify sha256sum.txt.asc

Once you are sure that the checksums are properly signed by the CentOS Project, you have to include them in your Vagrantfile (Vagrant unfortunately ignores the checksum provided from the command line). Here's the relevant snippet from my own Vagrantfile, using v1803.01 and VirtualBox:

Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "centos/7"

  config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |virtualbox, override|
    virtualbox.memory = 1024
    override.vm.box_download_checksum_type = "sha256"
    override.vm.box_download_checksum = "b24c912b136d2aa9b7b94fc2689b2001c8d04280cf25983123e45b6a52693fb3"
    override.vm.box_url = "https://cloud.centos.org/centos/7/vagrant/x86_64/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-Vagrant-1803_01.VirtualBox.box"
  end
end

Feedback

If you encounter any unexpected issues with the Vagrant images, feel free to ask on the centos-devel mailing list, or in #centos on Freenode IRC.

Ackowledgements

I would like to warmly thank Brian Stinson, Fabian Arrotin and Thomas Oulevey for their work on the build infrastructure, as well as Patrick Lang from Microsoft for testing and feedback on the Hyper-V images. I would also like to thank the CentOS Project Lead, Karanbir Singh, without whose years of continuous support we wouldn't have had the Vagrant images in their present form.

I would also like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order):

  • Graham Mainwaring, for helping with tests and validations;
  • Michael Vermaes, for testing our official images, as well as for writing the detailed guide to using them with VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro;
  • Kirill Kalachev, for reporting and debugging the host name errors with VirtualBox on Windows hosts.

CentOS Community Newsletter, July 2019 (#1907)

Wednesday , 3, July 2019 Rich Bowen networking Leave a comment

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

Yes, I'm running a little behind schedule with this month's newsletter. That's because I just got back from the Open Source Summit in Shanghai, where I met a number of CentOS enthusiasts. More about that a little later.

CentOS 8 Status 17-June-2019

Monday , 17, June 2019 bstinson Uncategorized 13 Comments

Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (on 07-May) we've been looking
into the tools that we use to build CentOS Linux. We've chosen to use the Koji
buildsystem for RPMs, paired with the Module Build Service for modules, delivered through a distribution called Mbox.

Mbox allows us to run the Koji Hub (the central job orchestrator), and the Module Build Service in an instance of OKD that we maintain specifically for our buildsystem work. We have 2 instances of mbox; one for the primary architectures (x86_64, ppc64le, and aarch64), and one for the secondary architecture (armhfp). OKD lets us run those instances on the same hardware but in separate namespaces. The builder machines are separate from the OKD cluster, and connect back to the individual buildsystems that they're assigned to.

As usual, you can find the sources for the RPMs and Modules that make up CentOS 8 at https://git.centos.org

Also as usual, we don't forecast dates on when CentOS 8 will release for General Availability, but we will release it as soon as it's ready.

You can follow live updates here: https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8

Some Statistics so Far:

Total non-modular Packages: 2542
Packages Built: 2523
Updates to Build: 25
Failed Packages: 17

Total number of Module/Streams: 61
Modules Built: 14
Failed Modules: 0

Secure boot shim status: Done

Challenges

If you've been following progress closely, you may have noticed that the buildsystems seemed quiet over the past week or so. We were almost through the entire non-modular build cycle when we noticed some modules were required for building the next batch of non-modular packages. We focused, then, on building some of the necessary modules but found some of their dependencies were not pushed to git.centos.org. That problem has since been resolved, and we expect to resume module builds (and unblock the rest of the 17 failed packages) sometime this week.

What's Next?

Once the builds are complete, we are also investigating a consolidated approach to composing the repositories and other artifacts (like cloud images) that make up CentOS 8. See the centos-devel mailing list for discussion on the structure of these artifacts.

We still need to do the following things:

  • Finish all of the component builds
  • Sign all of the built RPMs
  • Send a compose to the QA group for testing
  • Finalize the repo structure on the mirrors
  • Compose CentOS 8

Stay tuned for a followup blog post with another update and Frequently Asked Questions

 

CentOS Community Newsletter, June 2019 (#1906)

Tuesday , 4, June 2019 Rich Bowen Uncategorized Leave a comment

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

As in most years, May was extremely busy.

The Status of CentOS 8

We'll start with the question that appears to be on everyone's mind.

As you may know by this point, on May 7th, at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. You can read the full announcement on the Red Hat Developer Blog.

Since CentOS is a rebuild of RHEL, you can expect that the release of RHEL 8 will lead to the release of CentOS 8. And, of course, the most frequent question we received at Red Hat Summit, in the CentOS booth, was "when is CentOS 8 coming out?"

We don't have a definitive answer to this, because, especially with a new major release, there can be unforeseen complications. However, historically, a RHEL release is typically followed by the CentOS release within one or two months, so you can probably expect that general timeline.

We've also put up a wiki page that will track the day-to-day status of the rebuild effort. We ask that you follow that page, rather than asking on the mailing list for daily updates, and we will endeavor to keep that page current with daily changes in status.

Releases and updates

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0

In May at the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This, in turn, triggered the start of the process to build CentOS 8. This is discussed in more detail in the news item above.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during May:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during May:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during May:

Other Announcements

The following announcements also happened during May:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.

We have the following SIG reports this month:

CentOS Opstools SIG Quarterly Report

Mar 01, 2019 - May 31 2019

Purpose

provide tools and, documentation, recommendations and best practices
for operators of large infrastructure.

Membership update

The past state still continues, we are not attracting new contributors.

Health and Activity

CentOS opstools packages are being consumed by OpenStack Kolla, and
at the same time, for example also by oVirt.

For the future, we are removing messaging-related packages over
to the CentOS messaging SIG.

Issues for the Board

None at this point, but we should keep an eye on contributors.

Scientific SIG

In recent months, the Scientific Linux project announced that they would discontinue their work and move to CentOS 8 for the future. As a result, there are discussions happening about forming a Scientific SIG to continue their work under the CentOS umbrella. You should see more about this on the centos-devel mailing list in the coming weeks.

Events

As we've mentioned in the past two newsletters, in April we had the CentOS Dojo at Oak Ridge National Labs, Tennessee. I'll bring it up one last time to mention that the videos from the event - the full presentations, and interviews with several of the presenters - are now on our YouTube channel. There's a great presentation from John Turner, talking about what work ORNL does with their supercomputers (running CentOS and RHEL!), and that's a good place to start.

Then, in May, many CentOS community members congregated at Red Hat Summit in Boston. After the RHEL 8 release was announced, Jim Perrin addressed a crowd of people who had questions about what changes are coming for CentOS 8. Questions ranged from timing (addressed elsewhere in this newsletter) to questions about issues raised in the recent post on the Red Hat blog about experimenting with newer functionality in CentOS before it hits RHEL. We're looking forward to the coming year, and how you, our users, will be able to contribute to this process. We also want to hear your thoughts on what this future might look like.

There are still a number of events coming up this year where you can meet and interact with the CentOS community.

I'd particularly like to highlight, again, the CentOS Dojo at DevConf.US in Boston, August 18th. We now have a tentative schedule, but there's probably room for another presentation or two, if you're going to be in the area and have something to share. Based on feedback last year, we've added a lightning talks section, where you can give 5-10 minute presentations on what you've been working on. And we'll have Jim Perrin talking about what's happening around CentOS 8, which will presumably be released by that time. We hope to see you there!

If you're interested in hosting a Dojo at your organization or business, please get in touch with me, at rbowen@centosproject.org, with your proposed event.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

  • Tell us what you're working on
  • Provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • Tell us about an event that you attended where there was CentOS content
  • Write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • Tell us about a news article that covered the use of CentOS in an interesting way
  • Suggest an topic that you'd like to see someone else write an article on

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

 

CentOS 8.0.1905 build status

Thursday , 9, May 2019 Fabian Arrotin announcement, builds, distro 5 Comments

Hi,

As everybody is probably aware now, RHEL 8.0 was released earlier this week .

Instead of publishing multiple blog posts here and then point to updated content, we decided this time to have a dedicated wiki page that can be used to track our current status : https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8

So now you can look at that page while we're busy on those tasks, and refresh from time to time.

Let's spread the news about the wiki page and point people (on mailing-lists, irc, forums, etc) to that page to get all latest news about CentOS 8.0.1905 build status !

 

CentOS Storage SIG Quarterly Report

Tuesday , 7, May 2019 Niels de Vos announcement, Community Leave a comment

Purpose

To make CentOS a suitable platform for many different storage solutions. It should be very simple for users to deploy CentOS with the components of storage projects of their choice.

Membership Update

Ceph and Gluster are current projects in the CentOS Storage SIG. We have been in touch with other storage projects that have expressed interest, but nothing has come out of that yet. In addition to hoping to onboard new projects, we would also welcome new contributors that are interested in updating and testing packages when new upstream releases are available. Both Ceph and Gluster project consist out of a number of packages, and the few maintainers that keep these updated welcome assistance.

Releases and Packages

Ceph

...

Gluster

In the end of March Gluster 6 has been released and announced on the CentOS announce list. This comes with a new centos-release-gluster6 package that replaces the Provides: centos-release-gluster of the Gluster 5 release. New deployments that install centos-release-gluster to enable the most current maintained Gluster release, will automatically get Gluster 6. Older installations will not automatically be updated, but instead stay on the Gluster version that they have. With the release of Gluster 6 there has not been a deprecation from older Gluster versions. For details on what versions are maintained, see the Gluster Community Release Schedule.

Other versions still maintained by the Storage SIG are Gluster 4.1 and Gluster 5. Users can still consume these versions by installing centos-release-gluster41 or centos-release-gluster5.

CentOS Pulse Newsletter, May 2019 (#1905)

Tuesday , 7, May 2019 Rich Bowen Uncategorized 3 Comments

Dear CentOS enthusiast,

Another month into 2019, and we have a lot to tell you about.

#CentOS15

Yes, we've mentioned this before, but we're still pretty stoked about it. On the 15th, we celebrated our 15th birthday with a small group of friends in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, before our Dojo at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. You can see some of the videos from that event beginning to appear on our YouTube channel.

If you would like to talk about your involvement in CentOS, please get in touch with Rich at rbowen@centosproject.org  You don't need to be one of the founders - just to have something interesting to say about your involvement, past, present, and future.

git.centos.org changes

As we mentioned last month, there have been some significant changes to git.centos.org. The service was upgraded/migrated to Pagure. You can read details about the change, and instructions on using the new service on the mailing list archive. And further documentation is now in the wiki, at https://wiki.centos.org/Sources

If you have any questions or difficulties using the new service, please drop by either the centos-devel mailing list, or the #centos-devel IRC channel on Freenode.

 

Releases and updates

We had another moderately busy month for update and releases.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during April:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during April:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during April:

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS. We have recently started having SIGs report quarterly, so we have just a few of them each month, getting through the entire list every 3 months.

We have the following SIG reports this month:

NFV SIG

The NFV SIG posted their report to the CentOS blog.

Storage SIG

This is by no means a complete report but here are a few "juicy" notes
hopefully worth sharing!

Starting in May we'll have a new member in the Storage SIG: Francesco
Pantano, he'll start helping us with the maintenance of the
Ceph/ceph-ansible builds (and their deps).

We have in fact finally populated our Ceph Nautilus repo with a initial
Ceph Nautilus build and we also included RC builds of ceph-ansible;
please help us test both Ceph and the deployment tool itself enabling
the SIG repos by installing the new centos-release-ceph-nautilus package.

We're looking for help with the new builds test automation; ideally we'd
like to have automatic promotion into -release repos of the new builds
when these pass testing; if you can or are interested in helping us with
this effort please get in touch!

See you online.

Cloud SIG

Purpose
Packaging and maintaining different FOSS based Private cloud infrastructure applications that one can install and run natively on CentOS.
Membership Update
We are always looking for new members, especially representation from cloud technologies other than RDO.
Releases and PackagesRDO
April 8 - 12 OpenStack Stein Released https://blogs.rdoproject.org/2019/04/rdo-stein-released/
Interesting things in the Stein release include:
- Ceph Nautilus is the default version of Ceph, a free-software storage platform, implements object storage on a single distributed computer cluster, and provides interfaces for object-, block- and file-level storage, within RDO (or is it the default without OpenStack?).  Within Nautilus, the Ceph Dashboard has gained a lot of new functionality like support for multiple users / roles, SSO (SAMLv2) for user authentication, auditing support, a new landing page showing more metrics and health info, I18N support, and REST API documentation with Swagger API.
- The extracted Placement service, used to track cloud resource inventories and usages to help other services effectively manage and allocate their resources, is now packaged as part of RDO. Placement has added the ability to target a candidate resource provider, easing specifying a host for workload migration, increased API performance by 50% for common scheduling operations, and simplified the code by removing unneeded complexity, easing future maintenance.
Other improvements include:
- The TripleO deployment service, used to develop and maintain tooling and infrastructure able to deploy OpenStack in production, using OpenStack itself wherever possible, added support for podman and buildah for containers and container images. Open Virtual Network (OVN) is now the default network configuration and TripleO now has improved composable network support for creating L3 routed networks and IPV6 network support.
  •  April 28 - May 1 OpenInfrastructure Summit Denver Colorado USA
  • May 2 - 4 Train Release Project Team Gathering Denver Colorado USA
  • June 3 - 7 Train Milestone 1
  • June 13 - 14 RDO Test Days Train Milestone 1
Health and Activity
The Cloud SIG remains fairly healthy. However, it is still, for the most part, a monoculture containing only OpenStack.
Issues for the Board
We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.
---
As always, a big thank you to our SIGs, for the work that they do, and for the time taken to check back in with these status reports!

Events

In April, as mentioned above, we ran a CentOS Dojo at ORNL - Oak Ridge National Labs. The presentation slides are starting to get added to  the event website. We expect to have the full video from the event within the next week or two.

I'm writing this newsletter from the  Open Infrastructure Summit (formerly known as OpenStack Summit), in Denver. We joined our friends from RDO and Ceph, as well as our colleagues from Red Hat, to discuss all aspects of open infrastructure, especially OpenStack.

A high point included the gathering of some of the largest open science clusters on the planet, running their OpenStack/RDO clouds on CentOS

And, coming up, we're planning to run a CentOS Dojo in Boston, on the day before DevConf.US. The call for presentations is open, and we want to hear from you! Talks about anything you're doing in, on, or around CentOS is fair game. Submit your talks HERE.

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

  • report on CentOS community activity
  • provide a report from the SIG on which you participate
  • maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter
  • write an article on an interesting person or topic
  • provide the hint, tip or trick of the month

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.

 

NFV SIG Quarterly Report

Wednesday , 1, May 2019 tfherbert Uncategorized Leave a comment

NFV SIG Quarterly Report through May 1st, 2019

Purpose

The CentOS NFV  SIG exists to support Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in CentOS. Specifically, the idea is to be a vehicle to provide packages for implementers of software networks on the CentOS platform.

Membership Update

In this reporting period, we have had little formal participation. However, there has been continued in NFV on CentOS and interest in deploying our packages on CentOS. We are always looking for additional community participation in all aspects of this SIG, including promoting, building releasing other packages for NFV.

Anyone interested in participating in the NFV SIG should subscribe to the generic CentOS mailing list.

Releases and Packages

fd.io VPP

The past quarter has been a somewhat slow one in terms of actual delivered packages.

However, we did release vpp 19.01.

The outlook for vpp 19.04 and 19.08 is TBD at this point.

DPDK

There has been some renewed interest in dpdk packaging. At this point, there is no immediate plans to release recent DPDK in NFV SIG.

We would welcome a sponsor to work with the NFV SIG upstream community to bring recent dpdk packages into CentOS NFV SIG.

Health and Activity

The health of NFV SIG could be better. It was originally perceived as the sponsor for getting OPNFV project into the CentOS distribution. However, subsequently OPNFV releases its own CD images. Subsequently it was primarily sponsoring building opendaylight packages which are still built as part of the upstream product CI.

Since Q1 2018 the project has been focused on building packages and dependencies for upstream fast data plane project, fd.io

In April, vpp 1901 has been released to mirrors and is currently available in build-logs.

At this point, the NFV SIG is continuing to look for a renewed focus. In particular, we are looking for packages to facilitate containerization and kubernetes. Other ideas and sponsors are welcome.

Issues for the Board

We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.