Ralph's Open Source Blog

14/04/202010/07/2021

Ceph Octopus running on Debian Buster

In my previous blog I explained how to run the Ceph Storage System on Debian 9. In the mean time the new version 15 (Octopus) was released. And this version not only runs on Debian 10 (Buster) it also provides a complete new install process. In the previous release of ceph you had to run the command line tool ‘ceph-deploy’. This tool was not so easy to manage and there was a lot of work to get ceph running.

With the new Octopus release there is a new admin tool called cephadm. This tool is based on docker which means there is no need to install additional tools or libraries on your host. The only thing you need is a server running docker.

08/04/202008/04/2020

Debian Upgrade form Stretch to Buster

Today I updated my Debian system on my working mashine form Stretch to Buster. This is just a short reminder for myself. I followed the blog form nixcraft here.

1. Check version

First check your current version and note if you need it for fixing problems later.

$ lsb_release -a
 No LSB modules are available.
 Distributor ID: Debian
 Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 9.12 (stretch)
 Release:        9.12
 Codename:       stretch
$ uname -mrs
 Linux 4.9.0-12-amd64 x86_64

2. Update installed packages

First bring your strech up to date by updating all your installed packages

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt full-upgrade
$ sudo apt --purge autoremove

3. Update /etc/apt/sources.list file

Now you can update your debian package source list from stretch to buster. First check your current versions:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list

Now you need to replace the strech references with buster. This can be done quickly with the sed command:

$ sudo cp -v /etc/apt/sources.list /root/
$ sudo cp -rv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ /root/
$ sudo sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i 's/stretch/buster/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*

You can verify our new list

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list

Finally update you new package list

$ sudo apt update

4. Minimal system upgrade

In the next step you perform a minimal system update to avoid removing to much packages.

$ sudo apt upgrade

Answer question about restart of services wit ‘yes’

5. Upgrading Debain 9 to Debian 10

No you can run the real upgrade to Debain 10.

$ sudo apt full-upgrade

…this will take some time…

6. Reboot and Verification

Finally reboot your system…

$ sudo reboot

…and check the new version

$ uname -r
$ lsb_release -a

7. Clean up

Rund the autoremove command to get rid of old packages:

$ sudo apt --purge autoremove

Thats it! Have fun with fine tuning your new Debian Buster!

07/04/2020

Build Your Own Kubernetes Cluster

Kubernetes is definitely the most widely used solution when it comes to container platforms. Everyone knows it by now and it is not only used successfully in large projects. But I think it is also true that many projects do not run Kubernetes themselves but use one of the major platform operators. But why is it like that? It is not always a good idea to give up control. And certainly not when it comes to your own data.

05/04/202021/05/2020

Traefik v2.2 and Kubernetes Ingress

Since Version 2 Traefik supports Kubernetes Ingress and acts as a Kubernetes Ingress controller. This is an alternative to the Traefik specific ingressRoute objects. With v2.2. you can now use plain Kubernetes Ingress Objects together with annotations. Of course you can still use IngressRoute objects if you need them for specific requirements.

I tested this feature within Kubernetes 1.17.3. In this blog post I want to point out the important parts of the configuration. Please note that I provide a details setup for Traefik running within a self managed Kubernetes cluster in my open source project Imixs-Cloud.

29/03/2020

OpenLiberty – Performance

In the course of our open source project Imixs-Office-Workflow, I have now examined OpenLiberty in more detail. And I came up to the conclusion that OpenLiberty has a very impressive performance.

Docker

I run OpenLiberty in Docker in the version ‘20.0.0.3-full-java8-openj9-ubi’. Our application is a full featured Workflow Management Suite with a Web Interface and also a Rest API. So for OpenLiberty we use the following feature set:

...
	<featureManager>
		<feature>javaee-8.0</feature>
		<feature>microProfile-2.2</feature>>
		<feature>javaMail-1.6</feature>
	</featureManager>
...

As recommended by OpenLiberty I use the following Dockerfile layout:

FROM openliberty/open-liberty:20.0.0.3-full-java8-openj9-ubi
# Copy postgres JDBC driver
COPY ./postgresql-9.4.1212.jar /opt/ol/wlp/lib
# Add config
COPY --chown=1001:0 ./server.xml /config/server.xml

# Activate Debug Mode...
# COPY --chown=1001:0 ./jvm.options /config/

# Copy sample application
COPY ./imixs-office-workflow*.war /config/dropins/

RUN configure.sh

The important part here is the RUN command at the end of the Dockerfile. This script adds the requested XML snippets and grow image to be fit-for-purpose. This makes the docker build process a little bit slower, but the startup of the image is very fast.

I measured a startup time of round about 12 seconds. This is very fast for the size and complexity of this application. And it is a little bit faster than the startup of Wildfly with round about 15 seconds. Only in case of a hot-redeploy of the application Wildfly seems to be a little bit faster (6 seconds) in compare to OpenLiberty (8 seconds).

	Open Liberty	Wildfly
Docker Startup Time	12 sec	15 sec
Application Hot Deploy	8 sec	6 sec

Debug Mode

Note: activating the debug port makes OpenLiberty performance very poor. So do not forget to deactivate debugging in productive mode! The debug mode can be activated by providing a jvm.options file like this:

-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=7777

I have commented on this in the Dockerfile example above.

26/03/202026/03/2020

OpenLiberty and Hot-Deployment

The OpenSource application server OpenLiberty from IBM is very suitable for running microservices and web applications in production. But also for development, the server offers a very good support of autodeploy and hotdeployment.

Per default you can simply drop a new .war file into the folder /config/dropins/ and OpenLiberty will immediately deploy your application. You can configure the behavior of dropins in detail in the server.xml file.

For example, if you add the following tag into your server.xml file:

...
 <applicationManager autoExpand="true" />
....

then your application will be automatically expanded into a new folder at

${server.config.dir}/apps/expanded/APP_NAME/

Now when you deploy your application you will have a file layout like this:

./server.xml
./dropins/myapplication.war
./apps/expanded/myapplication.war/my-page.jsf
./apps/expanded/myapplication.war/WEB-INF/classes/com/foo/SomeAppClass.class

In case you use autoexpand=true than the “active” set of files will be the files under the apps/expanded/ folder which you can then hot-update. This approach is useful if you want to deploy a single .war file and then make tweaks to it after you deploy it, such as in dev mode.

javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE

Note that the hot-deployment for JSF files is only working if your PROJECT_STAGE param is set to ‘development’. So if not yet activated add the following into your web.xml file:

<context-param>
	<param-name>javax.faces.PROJECT_STAGE</param-name>
	<param-value>Development</param-value>
</context-param>

For production it is recommended to set the parameter to ‘Production’. In this mode JSF files will be cached by OpenLiberty internally.

Alternatively you can set the param ‘javax.faces.FACELETS_REFRESH_PERIOD’ to 1 which will also force OpenLiberty to scann for changed JSF files and class files:

<context-param>
 	<param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_REFRESH_PERIOD</param-name>
    	<param-value>1</param-value>
</context-param>

Manik Hot-Deply Plugin

With the Eclipse Hot-Deploy Plugin ‘Manik’ you can enable autodeploy and hot-deploy easily for OpenLiberty.

If you use the Option ‘Explode Artifacts’ you can deploy the .war as a folder directly into the /config/dropins/ folder of your OpenLiberty installation. The Hotdeployment directory is than the .war/ sub directory after the first deployment. You can disable the ‘autoExpand’ feature of OpenLiberty in this case. See also the discussion here.

21/03/202022/03/2020

Microsoft Teams on Linux

I am not a friend of Microsoft at all but for some reasons I need the Tool Microsoft Teams for some of my customer projects. In the past it was not possible to join a meeting from a Linux machine. But to be honest, Microsoft is working a lot in the Linux world and also contributes a lot of code. So Microsoft is now also supporting Teams .

To install Teams on Linux Debian is quite simple:

1. Download the Debian packages ‘teams….._amd64.deb’ from the microsoft official download page:
https://teams.microsoft.com/downloads#allDevicesSection

2. To install the package from your download run:

$ sudo dpkg -i teams_1.x.xx.xxx_amd64.deb

3. Now you can launch Microsoft Teams:

$ teams

Note: To use teams you should create a Microsoft Account. I am not sure if this is really necessary but I have had already an account.

Stop Microsoft Teams From Starting Automatically on Debian/Gnome

One of the most nasty features of Teams for Linux is that it starts automatically after a reboot and it will stay in background even if you have closed teams. This is an immorality, however, that can easily be avoided.

Within teams there is a ‘Settings’ dialog page where you can deactivate autostart function:

If you deactivate the first two application options Teams will be closed completely after you close the teams window. So you can be sure teams is not exchanging data in the background anymore.

To start teams manually again run:

$ teams

03/03/2020

Kubernetes and GlusterFS

In this Blog I will explain how to install a distributed filesystem on a kubernetes cluster. To run stateful docker images (e.g. a Database like PostgreSQL) you have two choices.

run the service on a dedicated node – this avoids the lost of data if kubernetes re-schedules your server to another node
use a distributed storage solution like ceph or glusterfs storage

Gluster is a scalable network filesystem. This allows you to create a large, distributed storage solution on common hard ware. You can connect a gluster storage to Kubernetes to abstract the volume from your services.

28/02/202028/02/2020

Howto Install Ceph on CentOS 7

In this blog I will explain how to install the Ceph storage system on CentOS. In my previous blog I showed how to install ceph on Debian. But the newer version of ceph are not supported by Debian and Ceph is much better supported by CentOS because RedHat maintains both CentOS and Ceph.

In this blog I will install Ceph ‘Nautilus’ on CentOS 7. You will find detailed information about ceph and the installation process for nautilus release here.

21/02/202014/04/2020

Kubernetes – Storage Volumes with Ceph

In this blog I show how to setup a Kubernetes Storage Volume with Ceph. I assume that you have installed already a kubernetes cluster with one master-node and at least three worker-nodes. On each worker node you need a free unmounted device used exclusively for ceph. Within the ceph cluster I setup a Ceph Filesystem (CephFS) that we can use as a storage volume for kubernetes.