It's usually always a good thing to receive a newer laptop, as usually that means shiny new hardware, better performances and also better battery life. I was really pleased with previous Lenovo Thinkpad t460s and so the normal choice was its successor, also because default model following company standard, and so the t490s

When I received the laptop, I was a little bit surprized (had no real time to review/analyze in advance) by some choices :

• No SD card reader anymore (useful when having to "dd" some image for armhfp tests)
• Old docking style is gone and you have to connect through usb-c/thunderbolt
• Embedded gigabit ethernet in the t490s (Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (6) I219-LM (rev 30)) isn't used at all when docked, but going through usb-net device

Installing CentOS Stream (so running kernel 4.18.0-147.6.el8.x86_64 when writing this post) was a breeze, after I turned on SecureBoot (useful also because you can also use fwupd to get LVFS firmware updates automagically as I did for my t460s)

But quickly I realized a huge difference between my previous t460s and the new t490s : heat/temperature and so fan usage. To a point where it was …

Puppet CA/puppetmasterd cert renewal

While we're still converting our puppet controlled infra to Ansible, we still have some nodes "controlled" by puppet, as converting some roles isn't something that can be done in just one or two days. Add to that other items in your backlog that all have priority set to #1 and then time is flying, until you realize this for your existing legacy puppet environment (assuming false FQDN here, but you'll get the idea):

Warning: Certificate 'Puppet CA: puppetmasterd.domain.com' will expire on 2019-05-06T12:12:56UTC
Warning: Certificate 'puppetmasterd.domain.com' will expire on 2019-05-06T12:12:56UTC

So, as long as your PKI setup for puppet is still valid, you can act in advance, resign/extend CA and puppetmasterd and distribute newer CA certs to agents, and go forward with other items in your backlog, while still converting from puppet to Ansible (at least for us)

Puppetmasterd/CA

Before anything else, (in case you don't backup this, but you should), let's take a backup on the Puppet CA (in our case, it's a Foreman driven puppetmasterd, so foreman host is where all this will happen, YMMV)

tar …

While I have to admit that I'm using Zabbix since the 1.8.x era, I also have to admit that I'm not an expert, and that one can learn new things every day. I recently had to implement a new template for a custom service, that is multi-instances aware, and so can be started multiple times with various configurations, and so with its own set of settings, like tcp port on which to listen, etc .. , but also the number of instances running as it can be different from one node to the next one.

I was thinking about the best way to implement this through Zabbix, and my initial idea was to just have one template per possible instance type, that would though use macros defined at the host level, to know which port to check, etc .. so in fact backporting into zabbix what configuration management (Ansible in our case) already has to know to deploy such app instance.

But parallel to that, I always liked the fact that Zabbix itself has some internal tools to auto-discover items and so triggers for those : That's called Low-level Discovery (LLD in short).

By default, if you use (or have modified) some …

Recently I had to update the existing code running behind mirrorlist.centos.org (the service that returns you a list of validated mirrors for yum, see the /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS*.repo file) as it was still using the Maxmind GeoIP Legacy country database. As you can probably know, Maxmind announced that they're discontinuing the Legacy DB, so that was one reason to update the code. Switching to GeoLite2 , with python2-geoip2 package was really easy to do and so was done already and pushed last month.

But that's when I discussed with Anssi (if you don't know him, he's maintaining the CentOS external mirrors DB up2date, including through the centos-mirror list ) that we thought about not only doing that change there, but in the whole chain (so on our "mirror crawler" node, and also for the isoredirect.centos.org service), and random chat like these are good because suddenly we don't only want to "fix" one thing, but also take time on enhancing it and so adding more new features.

The previous code was already supporting both IPv4 and IPv6, but it was consuming different data sources (as external mirrors were validated differently for ipv4 vs ipv6 connnectivity). So …

One thing that one has to like with Entreprise distribution is the same stable api/abi during the distro lifetime. If you have one application that works, you'll know that it will continue to work.

But in parallel, one can't always decide the application to run on that distro, with the built-in components. I was personally faced with this recently, when I was in a need to migrate our Bug Tracker to a new version. Let's so use that example to see how we can use "newer" php pkgs distributed through the distro itself.

The application that we use for https://bugs.centos.org is MantisBT, and by reading their requirements list it was clear than a CentOS 7 default setup would not work : as a reminder the default php pkg for .el7 is 5.4.16 , so not supported anymore by "modern" application[s].

That's where SCLs come to the rescue ! With such "collections", one can install those, without overwriting the base pkgs, and so can even run multiple parallel instances of such "stack", based on configuration.

Let's just start simple with our MantisBT example : forget about the traditional php-* packages (including "php" which provides the mod_php for Apache …

Yesterday, I got some alerts for some nodes in the CentOS Infra from both our monitoring system, but also confirmed by some folks reporting errors directly in our #centos-devel irc channel on Freenode.

The impacted nodes were the nodes we use for mirrorlist service. For people not knowing what they are used for, here is a quick overview of what happens when you run "yum update" on your CentOS node :

• yum analyzes the .repo files contained under /etc/yum.repos.d/
• for CentOS repositories, it knows that it has to use a list of mirrors provided by a server hosted within the centos infra (mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=updates&infra=$infra )
• yum then contacts one of the server behind "mirrorlist.centos.org" (we have 4 nodes so far : two in Europe and two in USA, all available over IPv4 and IPv6)
• mirrorlist checks the src ip and sends back a list of current/up2date mirrors in the country (some GeoIP checks are done)
• yum then opens connection to those validated mirrors

We monitor the response time for those services, and average response time is usually < 1sec (with some exceptions, mostly due to network latency …

That's something I should have blogged about earlier, but I almost forgot about it, until I read on twitter other people having replaced their home network equipment with Ubnt/Ubiquiti gear so I realized that it was on my to 'TOBLOG' list.

During the winter holidays, the whole family was at home, and also with kids on the WiFi network. Of course I already had a different wlan for them, separated/seggregated from the main one, but plenty of things weren't really working on that crappy device. So it was time to setup something else. I had opportunity to play with some Ubiquiti devices in the past, so finding even an old Unifi UAP model was enough for my needs (just need Access Point, routing/firewall being done on something else).

If you've already played with those tools, you know that you need a controller to setup the devices up , and because it's 'only' a java/mongodb stack, I thought it would be trivial to setup on a low-end device like RaspberryPi3 (not limited to that , so all armhfp boards on which you can run CentOS would work)

After having installed CentOS 7 armhfp minimal on the device, and once …

So, end of the year is always when you have some "time off" and so can work on various projects that were left behind. While searching for other hardware collecting dust in my furniture (other blog post coming soon about that too) I found my old Asus Eeepc 900 and was wondering if I could resurrect it.

While it was working CentOS 5 and then 6 "just fine" I wanted to give it a try with CentOS 7.

Of course, if you remember the specs from that ~2008 small netbook, you remember that it had :

• slow cpu (Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz)
• only 1Gb of ram
• very limited disk space (ASUS-PHISON OB SSD 4GB + additional 8GB for my model)

Setting up the full Gnome3 experience on it would be completely useless and also unusable. So let's try to setup CentOS 7 AltArch minimal (needed as cpu is only i686/32bits) and add what we need after that. So here we go :

• Download netinstall iso image (I used "local" mirror for me , so http://mirror.nucleus.be/centos-altarch/7/isos/i386/CentOS-7-i386-NetInstall-1611.iso)
• use dd to transfer it to usb storage key
• starting the installed on the eeepc
• wait …

Suppose that you have a RDO/Openstack cloud already in place, but that you'd want to automate some operations : what can you do ? On my side, I already mentioned that I used puppet to deploy initial clouds, but I still prefer Ansible myself when having to launch ad-hoc tasks, or even change configuration[s]. It's particulary true for our CI environment where we run "agentless" so all configuration changes happen through Ansible.

The good news is that Ansible has already some modules for Openstack but it has some requirements and a little bit of understanding before being able to use those.

First of all, all the ansible os_ modules need "shade" on the host included in the play, and that will be responsible of all os_ modules launch. At the time of writing this post, it's not yet available on mirror.centos.org, (a review is open so that will be soon available directly) but you can find the pkg on our CBS builders

Once installed, a simple os_image task was directly failing, despite the fact that auth: was present, and that's due to a simple reason : Ansible os_ modules still want to use v2 API, while it's now defaulting …

Recently we got our hands on some aarch64 (aka ARMv8 / 64Bits) nodes running in a remote DC. On my (already too long) TODO/TOTEST list I had the idea of testing armhfp VM on top of aarch64. Reason is that when I need to test our packages, using my own Cubietruck or RaspberryPi3 is time consuming : removing the sdcard, reflashing with the correct CentOS 7 image and booting/testing the pkg/update/etc ...

So is that possible to just automate this through available aarch64 node as hypervisor ? Sure ! and it's just pretty straightforward if you have already played with libvirt. Let's so start with a CentOS 7 aarch64 minimal setup and then :

yum install qemu-kvm-tools qemu-kvm virt-install libvirt libvirt-python libguestfs-tools-c
systemctl enable libvirtd --now

That's pretty basic but for armhfp we'll have to do some extra steps : qemu normally tries to simulate a bios/uefi boot, which armhfp doesn't support, and qemu doesn't emulate the mandatory uboot to just chainload to the RootFS from the guest VM.

So here is just what we need :

• Import the RootFS from an existing image

curl http://mirror.centos.org/altarch/7/isos/armhfp/CentOS-Userland-7 …