Blog.CentOS.org - News, views and reports on CentOS

YUM4/DNF for CentOS 7 updates

Tuesday , 17, April 2018 mblaha announcement, General 1 Comment

I am pleased to announce some significant updates to our ConfigManagement Special Interest Group for YUM4. This provides YUM4, based on DNF technology, for testing on CentOS Linux 7/x86_64. These updates are based on feedback from our prior test release last October. It includes signed packages, core DNF plugins, and uses a version of RPM very similar to and compatible with the upcoming version of CentOS 7.5.

This initiative is based on a partnership with the upstream YUM and DNF maintainers for the future of package management. Our testing thus far indicates no major problems, but we would love to find out how it fits into your existing YUM 3 workflows. So please consider filling out the short survey - your feedback helps us all get better.

YUM 4 provides significant improvements such as fast dependency resolution and a stable, documented API. See the references below for detailed improvements. We have made every effort to preserve the existing end-user experience that is available with YUM 3. This is the primary reason for making YUM 4 available for testing now.

“What’s with the YUM4 name?”

We recognize that we need to enable users to test YUM4 (/usr/bin/yum4) within their existing workflows in order to fully understand compatibility while retaining YUM version 3 (/usr/bin/yum) as the default. Yes, they can both be used on the same system, switching back and forth. We do not recommend this behavior, but it should work with the only known issue being that each version retains its own separate history. So using the Rollback capability is not recommended as each version will not be aware of the other’s history. Note that the YUM4 name is temporary for the coexistence of versions 3 & 4.

“So, what all has changed?”

The documentation does a great job explaining the differences in great detail. In short, your existing experience using yum to install, remove, and update are identical. However, there are changes such as some of the plugins and yum utilities are now consolidated into `dnf-plugins-core`. Some of the yum CLI options changed and are either converted for you automatically or silently ignored when that behavior is automatically included. Existing custom plugins written for YUM 3 will not work with YUM 4. Please reference the DNF API Reference and Changes in DNF hook API compared to YUM 3 links for further information.

“I found a bug, what should I do?”

Please report any found bugs on Red Hat Bugzilla against Fedora/dnf component (make sure to mention versions and that you use package from CentOS).

And remember to submit feedback in the short survey to help us understand how it can be improved further.

“Three step install, get started right away”

# yum install centos-release-yum4
# yum install yum4
# yum4 install dnf-plugins-core

“I was already testing a previous version of YUM4. How do I update?”

# yum4 update centos-release-yum4
# yum4 update yum4

Many thanks to the CentOS Project team for their assistance in making this happen!

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1803.01)

Tuesday , 10, April 2018 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement 2 Comments

We are pleased to announce new official Vagrant images of CentOS Linux 6.9 and CentOS Linux 7.4.1708 for x86_64 (based on the sources of RHEL 7.4). All included packages have been updated to 3rd April 2018.

Known Issues

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.
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".
Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
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 (updated for this release).
Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. Try adding the following line to your Vagrantfile:
```
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

If the check passed, you can use the corresponding checksum when downloading the image with Vagrant:

$ export box_checksum="4440a10744855ec2819d726074958ad6cff56bb5a616f6a45b0a42d602aa1154"
$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum $box_checksum --provider libvirt --box-version 1803.01 centos/7

Feedback

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

Ackowledgements

We would like to warmly thank 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.

We would also like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically):

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.

Seven.centos.org is dead .. long life to blog.centos.org !

Monday , 9, April 2018 Fabian Arrotin Uncategorized Leave a comment

When we initially launched seven.centos.org, the idea was just to have a single blog instance that CentOS Dev and QA team members could use to give feedback and also report status update about the rebuild and testing of CentOS 7 : that was an easy entry point for people wanting to know how far we were in the process, what to expect, etc (and so give more transparency that during the CentOS 6 rebuild era) ... That was in 2014.

Then it continued to be used by some contributors who wanted to give hints or talk about CentOS 7 new features, but without having a personal blog (or if their personal blog wasn't aggregated through our http://planet.centos.org instance). As more and more people joined the CentOS SIGs , seven.centos.org was more and more used a central blogging platform around the CentOS ecosystem, and so not really anymore about the status of CentOS 7 itself (which was released in July 2014). We even linked authentication against our (deployed in the mean time) https://accounts.centos.org (through OpenID).

So we thought it was time to rename it to blog.centos.org, to reflect the reality. All previous links/permalinks are still working, but default URL is now blog.centos.org.

Happy blogging !

CentOS Atomic Host 7.1803 Available for Download

Friday , 6, April 2018 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1803), a lean 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.

This release rolls up all package minor updates that shipped through the month of March, including, most significantly, a move to docker version 1.13.

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

atomic-1.22.1-1.gitd36c015.el7.centos.x86_64
cloud-init-0.7.9-9.el7.centos.6.x86_64
docker-1.13.1-53.git774336d.el7.centos.x86_64
etcd-3.2.15-1.el7.x86_64
flannel-0.7.1-2.el7.x86_64
kernel-3.10.0-693.21.1.el7.x86_64
kubernetes-node-1.5.2-0.7.git269f928.el7.x86_64
ostree-2017.14-2.el7.x86_64
rpm-ostree-client-2017.11-1.atomic.el7.x86_64

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, qcow2 or Amazon Machine 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.

SuperComputing is #PoweredByCentOS

Tuesday , 3, April 2018 Rich Bowen Uncategorized Leave a comment

Last week I, and one of my colleagues, had the opportunity to attend SuperComputing Asia in Singapore. The great thing about the various SuperComputing conferences is getting to see what amazing things people are doing with HPC (High Performance Computing) to make the world a better place. This was very much the case last week at SC-Asia.

We had the opportunity to interview three people who are using HPC to solve real world problems, and I wanted to share those interviews with you.

First we spoke with Abhishek Saha who is an engineering student at National University of Singapore. He's working with the Hydroinformatics Institute of Singapore to simulate water run-off across the entire island, to propose solutions for flooding.

Next, we spoke with Nick Zang who is a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University. He's investigating jet engine noise, and ways of reducing that noise:

Finally, we spoke with Yap Jia Qing, who is the Founder & CEO of Nurture.AI, an organization dedicated to encouraging AI researchers to publish their findings in AI along with open source implementations of the research, in order to reduce the burden of reproducing, and then building on, that research. This, in turn, greatly accelerates the progress of AI research.

The first two of these researchers are using CentOS in their their supercomputing infrastrucures, as well as using the large CentOS infrastructure at the National SuperComputing Center. Nurture.ai is an Ubuntu shop. All of the work from all three of these projects is open source, in an effort to accelerate research and implementations.

CentOS Linux can only come from the CentOS Project

Monday , 26, March 2018 Karsten Wade announcement, distro Leave a comment

An open letter from the CentOS Board.

We didn’t think we would have to say this, but here it is:

A rebuild of CentOS Linux is NOT CentOS Linux.

We can’t tell you how good a particular rebuild is, but we can definitely tell you one thing: if we didn’t build it, it is not CentOS Linux.

The CentOS Project trademark guidelines make it clear that no one has the project’s permission to use the “CentOS” mark for software that is not built and signed by the project.

https://www.centos.org/legal/trademarks/

Unless the binaries are from the CentOS Project, it is not CentOS Linux. It should not be called “CentOS”. Doing so causes confusion with everyone. The only official maintainer of any images is the CentOS Project.

Other groups are welcome to take the CentOS sources, rebuild them, and produce their own modified distribution, as long as they do not call it CentOS or otherwise act without our permission in using the CentOS name. Such distributions are not CentOS, and they should have their own name.

Better yet, we welcome anyone to participate in the CentOS Project and to help us with CentOS Linux. To build something into CentOS Linux you need to be an active part of the community, such as these folks:

If you want your work with open source software to be included via one of the above or a new SIG, here’s where to start:

https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup

The value of CentOS Linux is in the community: the participants and the users. When you use CentOS Linux you are part of a community full of people helping each other. You are using the platform that underlies so much upstream open source community development. That is the value of the trademark -- it says that you are getting the real software from the real community.

If you are interested in using (real) CentOS Linux in various places, you can find our software here:

https://www.centos.org/download/

Updated CentOS Vagrant Images Available (v1802.01)

Saturday , 10, March 2018 Laurențiu Păncescu announcement Leave a comment

Known Issues

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.
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".
Vagrant 1.8.5 is unable to create new CentOS Linux boxes due to Vagrant bug #7610
Vagrant 1.8.7 is unable to download or update boxes due to Vagrant bug #7969.
Vagrant 1.9.1 broke private networking, see Vagrant bug #8166
Vagrant 1.9.3 doesn't work with SMB sync due to Vagrant bug #8404
The vagrant-libvirt plugin is only compatible with Vagrant 1.5 to 1.8
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 (updated for this release).
Some people reported "could not resolve host" errors when running the centos/7 image for VirtualBox on Windows hosts. Try adding the following line to your Vagrantfile:
```
vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]
```

Recommended Setup on the Host

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

If the check passed, you can use the corresponding checksum when downloading the image with Vagrant:

$ export box_checksum="4440a10744855ec2819d726074958ad6cff56bb5a616f6a45b0a42d602aa1154"
$ vagrant box add --checksum-type sha256 --checksum $box_checksum --provider libvirt --box-version 1801.02 centos/7

Feedback

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

Ackowledgements

We would like to warmly thank 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.

We would also like to thank the following people (listed alphabetically):

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 Atomic Host 7.1802 Available for Download

Tuesday , 6, March 2018 Jason Brooks announcement Leave a comment

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated version of CentOS Atomic Host (7.1802), a lean 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.

This release rolls up all package minor updates that shipped through the month of February, including, most significantly, a newer version of rpm-ostree with support for overriding base packages during package layering operations. (see below for more details)

CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions:

atomic-1.20.1-9.git436cf5d.el7.centos.x86_64
cloud-init-0.7.9-9.el7.centos.2.x86_64
docker-1.12.6-71.git3e8e77d.el7.centos.1.x86_64
etcd-3.2.11-1.el7.x86_64
flannel-0.7.1-2.el7.x86_64
kernel-3.10.0-693.17.1.el7.x86_64
kubernetes-node-1.5.2-0.7.git269f928.el7.x86_64
ostree-2017.14-2.el7.x86_64
rpm-ostree-client-2017.11-1.atomic.el7.x86_64

rpm-ostree override

While it's been possible to layer new packages onto the base CentOS Atomic tree for some time now, overriding existing base packages with layered alternatives either wasn't possible or was considered experimental. Version 7.1802 now allows for overriding base packages.

For example, the origin-clients package that includes OpenShift Origin's "oc" tool conflicts with the kubernetes-client package included in the base tree. You can use package layering and overrides to install the openshift-release rpm, remove the conflicting rpms, and install the origin-clients rpm:

# rpm-ostree install centos-release-openshift-origin
# rpm-ostree override remove kubernetes-client kubernetes-node -r

# rpm-ostree install origin-clients -r

# oc cluster up
Starting OpenShift using openshift/origin:v3.7.0 ...
Pulling image openshift/origin:v3.7.0
...

Download CentOS Atomic Host

CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, qcow2 or Amazon Machine 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

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!

The SIG meets every two weeks as part of the Project Atomic community meeting at 16:00 UTC on Monday in the #atomic channel. 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.

Linchpin 1.5 release

Thursday , 22, February 2018 Rich Bowen announcement Leave a comment

LinchPin is a simple and flexible hybrid cloud orchestration tool. Its intended purpose is managing cloud resources across multiple infrastructures. These resources can be provisioned, decommissioned, and configured all using declarative data and a simple command-line interface.

Linchpin recently release 1.5, and I had an opportunity to talk with Clint Savage earlier this week about Linchpin and what it offers the world.