Search Results: "Christian Seiler"

24 November 2016

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: SAN Updates for Debian Stretch

Now that we prepare for the next Debian Stable release (Stretch), it is time to provide some updates on what the current state of some of the (storage related) packages in Debian is. This is not an update on the complete list of packages related to storage, but it does cover some of them. REMOVALS
  • iscsitarget - The iscsitarget stood as a great SCSI target for the Linux kernel. It seems to have had a good user base not just in Linux but also with VMWare users. But this storage target was always out-of-tree. With LIO having gotten merged as the default in-kernel SCSI Target, development on iscsitarget seems to have stalled. In Debian, for Stretch, there will be no iscsitarget. The package is already removed from Debian Testing and Debian Unstable, and nobody has volunteered to take over it.
  • system-storage-manager - This tool intended to be a simple unified storage tool, through which one could work with various storage technologies like LVM, BTRFS, cryptsetup, SCSI etc. But the upstream development hasn't really been much lately. For Debian Stable, it shouldn't be part of it, given it has some bugs.
  • libstoragemgmt - libstoragemgmt is a universal storage client-side library to talk to remote Storage Arrays. The project is active upstream. For Debian, the package is out-of-date and, now, also needs a maintainer. Unless someone picks up this package, it will not be part of Debian Stretch.
UPDATES
  • open-iscsi - This is the default iSCSI Initiator for Linux distributions. After a long slow development, upstream recently did a new release. This new release accomplished an important milestone; Hardware Offloading for QLogic cards. A special thanks to Frank Fegert, who helped with many aspects of the new iscsiuio package. And thanks to Christian Seiler, who is now co-maintaining the package, it is in great shape. We have fixed some long outstanding bugs and open-iscsi now has much much better integration with the whole system. For Jessie too, we have the up-to-date open-iscsi pacakges (including the new iscsiuio package, with iSCSI Offload) available through jessie-packports
  • open-isns - iSNS is the Naming Service for Storage. This is a new package in Debian Stretch. For users on Debian Jessie, Christian's efforts have made the open-isns package available in jessie-backports too.
  • multipath-tools - After years of slow development, multipath-tools too saw some active development this year, thanks to Xose and Christophe. The Debian version is up-to-date with the latest upstream release. For Debian Stretch, multipath-tools should have good integration with systemd.
  • sg3-utils - sg3 provides simple tools to query, using SCSI commands. The package is up-to-date and in good shape for Debian Stretch.
  • LIO Target - This is going to be the big entry for Debian Stretch. LIO is the in-kernel SCSI Target for Linux. For various reasons, we did not have LIO in Jessie. For Stretch, thanks to Christian Seiler and Christophe Vu-Brugier, we now have the well maintained -fb fork into Debian, which will replace the initial packages from the pre-fork upstream. The -fb fork is maintained by Andy Grover, and now, seems to have users from many other distributions and the kernel community. And given that LIO -fb branch is also part of the RHEL product family, we hope to see a well maintained project and an active upstream. The older packages: targetcli, python-rtslib and python-configshell shall be removed from the archive soon.
Debian users and derivatives, using these storage tools, may want to test/report now. Because once Stretch is released, getting new fixes in may not be easy enough. So please, if you have reliance on these tools, please test and report bugs, now.

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14 March 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (January and February 2016)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

5 August 2015

Antonio Terceiro: Elixir in Debian, MiniDebconf at FISL, and Debian CI updates

In June I started keeping track of my Debian activities, and this is my July update. Elixir in Debian Elixir is a functional language built on top of the Erlang virtual machine. If features imutable data structures, interesting concurrency primitives, and everything else that Erlang does, but with a syntax inspired by Ruby what makes it much more aproachable in my opinion. Those interested in Elixir for Debian are encouraged to hang around in #debian-elixir on the OFTC IRC servers. There are still a lot of things to figure out, for example how packaging Elixir libraries and applications is going to work. MiniDebconf at FISL, and beyond I helped organize a MiniDebconf at this year s FISL, in Porto Alegre on the 10th of July. The whole program was targetted at getting more people to participate in Debian, so there were talks about translation, packaging, and a few other more specific topics. I myself gave two talks: one about Debian basics, What is Debian, and how it works , and second one on packaging the free software web , which I will also give at Debconf15 later this month. The recordings are available (all talks in Portuguese) at the Debian video archive thanks to Holger Levsen. We are also organizing a new MiniDebconf in October as part of the Latinoware schedule. Ruby We are in the middle of a transition to switch to Ruby 2.2 as default in Debian unstable, and we are almost there. The Ruby transition is now on hold while GCC 5 one is going on, but will be picked up as soon as were are done with GCC 5. ruby-defaults has been uploaded to experimental for those that want to try having Ruby 2.2 as default before that change hits unstable. I myself have been using Ruby 2.2 as default for several weeks without any problem so far, including using vagrant on a daily basis and doing all my development on sid with it. I started taking notes about Ruby interpreter transitions work to make sure that knowledge is registered. I have uploaded minor security updates of both ruby2.1 and ruby2.2 to unstable. They both reached testing earlier today. I have also fixed another bug in redmine, which I hope to get into stable as well as soon as possible. gem2deb has seen several improvements through versions 0.19, 0.20, 0.20.1 and 0.20.2. I have updated a few packages: Two NEW packages, ruby-rack-contrib and ruby-grape-logging ,were ACCEPTED into the Debian archive. Kudos to the ftp-master team who are doing an awesome job reviewing new packages really fast. Debian Continuous Integration This month I have made good progress with the changes needed to make debci work as a distributed system with one master/scheduler node and as many worker nodes (running tests) as possible. While doing my tests, I have submitted a patch to lxc and updated autodep8 in unstable. At some point I plan to upload both autodep8 and autopkgtest to jessie-backports. Sponsoring I have sponsored a few packages: