Debian Utsav is celebration of Debian Folks – meet at one place, eat,
drink and work on Debian! Just decide a place and time and add it
here. Come join in any one listed at
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianIndia/DebianUtsav2012 and if you don’t
see something near you, just announce one!

At JUDCon 2012, I had a discussion and argument with Jaikiran Pai and Ravi Maurya on “Packaging Java JARs as RPM packages”.

Well it is not just RPM, it could be any package management system ( eg. dpkg, protage etc. ), doesn’t matter as long as it serves the purpose of:

• automatic dependency resolution
• installation of dependencies
• rollback an install step
• install multiple versions of a (JAR) package
• ensure the packages are authentic ( for security )

How is all this achieved in Java world? Simple. Just package all the required JARs in a single JAR or WAR or an EAR for that matter. And trust the packager for its security. But:

• Is this a good practice?
• What happens when you want to install the same package on multiple systems?
• Can you roll back changes easily on multiple installations?
• How are JARs shared across different kind of projects, some which use the same version of the same JAR package?

Consider the case of Maven, with which you can easily specify the dependencies and Maven does all the work of dependency resolution.
However, it solves the problem only at the developer’s level. JARs are still bundled inside the output application package (JAR / WAR / EAR). And everytime this application is distributed, it will contain “ALL” the dependencies. That is clearly an overhead.

That makes me think, why JARs don’t work like Shared Libraries, which can be shared across applications. Every classloader / JVM instance has its own version of the same JAR file on-disk! Can’t they be shared? That too is clearly an overhead. I am not aware of the reasons why it is so, which I would definitely like to know.

The point is, since a package manager has all the functionality, why not just leverage it? Java community is either unaware of it, or doesn’t care.

No problem. There are efforts already in place.

Anyway, of other things Jaikiran told me that, JBoss AS7 has how better and modular class loading which is based on JBoss Modules. This appears to me similar to how Maven structures it JAR repositories.

Here are some resources:

• What is the proper way to package a single jar file as rpm?
• Packaging Java Apps for Ubuntu @ FOSS.IN
• Java Packaging in Fedora
• Creating an RPM for a Java Application
• Maven plugin to create RPM packages

Thats it folks!

My first Java exclusive conference!

I arrived at the venue right on time. Surprize, there were a lot of people already holding their welcome kits. Conference was already running quite smoothly. Wifi worked most of the time. The sessions, lunch, tea were always on time. Actually, there were people assigned to ring bells, just like in schools, to notify timeout during lunch and tea breaks

The whole confenence was revolving around four major topics: JBoss AS7, Infinispan, Drools and OpenShift.

Opening talk was given by Harish Pillay, Red Hat Global Community Architecture Team.

The Keynote of the day was by Bruno Georges. He mentioned some interesting trends of which are:

• There are about 4 times the processors compared to the number or people in United States alone and growing. Meaning that the processing power is available in abundance.
• There is a significant growth in Ad-Hoc Social Networks for businesses

Now where is the industry heading? In perspective of Java, Java ME/EC is going to be merged with Java SE/EE. SQL based data is moving towards NoSQL which is now leading us to NewSQL. The software stacks are moving towards ubiquitous computing i.e. even smaller handheld devices, are capable of running these software stacks. To sum it up, it was a very factual and a visionary talk by Bruno.

I will defer the other topics till later. Let me talk about the topics I liked the most:

JPA – Painless Persistence

Painless Persistence by Greg Kable was a very engaging talk. It was kind of an OOPS/ORM primer. The concepts were explained in a very general terms like “why/when to use ORM and when not to”, Skinny Objects and their pitfalls. Why to avoid optimization? Such concepts could be applied to any kind of ORM in practice. Even if you didn’t know anything about JPA or Hibernate, you could understand the point Greg was trying to make. And by the way, there are 3 rules of optimization: don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. Before deciding on optimizing part(s) of your application always think of these 3 rules. It is just as a reminder that it might not make sense to put efforts on optimizing your applications first of all.

Future of Seam Framework

Seam 3 is final release of Seam project. That’s it. All future efforts are directed towards Apache DeltaSpike from now on. So, do think twice before using Seam for your new projects. However, Seam being a widely used framework, the bugfixes and mainitainence will still be available. And contributes, checkout the DeltaSpike project now!

Polyglot Revolution

This was an intersting topic. What it means is that many JVM based languages (ceylon, scala, clojure, ruby, python) and their frameworks ( like Ruby On Rails ) will be available integrated with JBoss AS. TorqueBox is a unique example of this. With this effort, you can use all the power and features of Java EE stack right into your other language frameworks. Same argument applies for Immutant.

JBoss Application Server

In the recent years, JBoss has seen a lot of increase in the number of hits on its project sites from the Indian region. Most of these hits are by the users who use JBoss. But what about the size of contributers? What is the plan ahead for community engagement? Well that is the question I asked the panel. JBoss Heroes is project that is supposed to address this issue. Lets see when it is going to actually materialize. JBoss AS7, the latest release, is fully EE6 compliant, is very lightweight and is blazing fast with a boot time less that 3 seconds!

Infinispan

I don’t know why but there were just too many talks on Infinispan alone ( over 6 talks ! ). Inifinispan is a data grid platform based on the design of Amazon Dynamo ( has many implementation including Apache Cassandra ). Infinispan spans a very broad set of usecases. It can act as an in memory cache, persistent cache, distributed cache, replicated cache for high availablity. Also it provides plugins for different backends like Arjuna TM, BDB, JDB, JDBC etc.

Essentially it acts a key/value store. Its real power comes from its flexibility, which allows it to be adapted for many many use cases.

Becoming an Open Source developer

“When in fight, I start to fear that if I get hit by my oppnent, worse is going to happen, and I will lose.” Well, dont! Believe in how good things are going to be if you succeed. Always think that you are going to bring the opponent down no matter what. Never fear of failure. Fear the fear itself, and put your best. That is the mantra of successful Open Source developers, quite well explained by Dmitris in his talk Becoming an Open Source developer. Fight the problem until you solve it. Isn’t that straight forward

Drools – Rules Engine and Complex Event Processing

In the talk “Declarative Rules” by Mark Proctor ( co-creator and founder of Drools ), he explained that Drools is Declarative Rules based engine. He demonstrated a simple game Wumpus World, that can be completely created using only rules. No other code required, which simplifies the whole process. Of the other things in his talk, there qere queries regarding Fuzzy logic support in Drools. Rules reduction or compaction process in Drools. Also rules processing on distributed and unstructured data, which is an inherently hard nut to crack.

In a subsequent talk “Demystifying Complex Event Processing” by Mark Proctor again, he explained how CEP works. How Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Stream Processing (ESP) and Event Drive Architecture (EDA) are closely related. Drools Fusion is the CEP tool by JBoss. To learn more about Drools / CEP there are many books available: The Power of Events, Event Drive Architecture, Drools JBoss Rules 6.0 Developer’s Guide, JBoss Drools Business Rules

I am happy to have met a lot of people Jaikiran Pai, Sachin Patil, Ray Ploski, Radoslav Husar, Ales Justin, Dmitris Andreadis, and many other whom I only listened to

However, I also missed a few things that would have made this conference even better in my opinion. There could have been an inclusion of activities like Hackathon, Bug Squadding or Workshop ( hands-on sessions ).

It has been a great learning experience. Keep them coming – the events – JUDCon 2012, you rock!

PS: I don’t see any slides nor the videos from JUDCon 2012 on their website yet. When are they coming?

= January Monthly Meet Announcement

== Date & Time

28 Jan
3:00pm to 5:00pm

=== Venue

Zilogic Systems,
Fourth Main Road,
Kamaraj Nagar,
Thiruvanmiyur,
Chennai

Location map: http://www.zilogic.com/contact.html

Agenda
–

1. Lightning Talks – 30 min.

- lxml – Processing XML with Python – Vijay Kumar
- AlphaBubbles – Siva Chandran
If you would like to give a lightning talk, just come prepared,
we will be able to accommodate you.

2. PyCon 2011 Video: API Design anti-patterns
by Alex Martelli – 45 min.

Designing interfaces so that other code can interact with ours
(whether our code is a library, framework, application,
website…) is a very common and clearly crucial activity, but
fraught with dangers — stuff we all keep doing wrong time after
time. This talks shows some common cases of API design errors
encountered in the wild, with tips on how to avoid them when you
design your next API.

entry free.
all are welcome.

spritle, a chennai based company is willing to do open source mobile
applications using Rhomobile.

Please give your ideas for the development.

http://www.spritle.com/community/ideas_for_opensource_mobileapps.html

friends.

as RMS is visiting Chennai, we feel that organizers should be clear on the free software concepts, difference between free software and open source etc.

there is a training session on these for volunteers and organizers for the event.

date – January 26 , 2012
time – 10.00 – 1.00
place – computer science block, room 32. iit madras, Chennai

all are welcome.

it Will be a memorable event in our life to be a part of organizing team on such great event.

see you tomorrow.

HOGGburger, a photo by Ankur Sinha: FranciscoD on Flickr.

HOGGburger!

So last weekend I thought of trying out the Eutester project which has been up on projects.eucalyptus.com for a while and now the code been moved to github with some serious development happening.

Well for those who are new to Eutester, it is a framework written in python which helps you test your Eucalyptus private cloud setup. Remember, testing can sometime be a hard job so best to automate it as much as possible with all your test cases. Besides that there is a lot more to it. I guess using the existing code which is part of the test framework one can develop his/her own test cases for varied scenarios/bugs and contribute the same to the Eutester code on github.

For me personally it is a great tool to have in my ninja pockets, makes my job pretty easier. Imagine you have a bug on launchpad that you want to replicate in your environment? How long would it take to execute those Steps to follow to re-create the problem and now imagine one single program, a Eutester test case doing all that for you in one shot, that’s what I call smartness.

Before starting off with how the framework actually works and the various components of it (which I guess is pretty straight forward and easy to understand) I just thought of giving one of the test cases a try and hence I did a:

git clone https://github.com/eucalyptus/eutester.git

Note that in order to use Eutester you need to have certain pre-requisites installed which is understandable. Following is the list of pre-requisites:

a) boto>=2.1
b) paramiko (SSH2 module for python)
c) python
d) Linux?

Note that Eutester is written in python so it requires you to have python, I had python 2.6 which works well with boto 2.1 and you also need python-setuptools.

Guess where I figured all this? Well just open setup.py in the Eutester code base and you will figure that out.

There are certain other assumptions made before hand regarding the cloud environment to be tested

a) The eucalyptus cloud already setup

b) Access to CLC via SSH

c) At-least one EMI registered

d) One SSH key pair available and added to the private cloud. Not a hard stop because Eutester can create the keypair and use that same with the instances it fires up.

e) Enough resources to start an instance on the cloud

f) If Linux instance needs to be accessed on SSH appropriate rules for the access via security groups

Once all the assumptions and pre-requisites are cleared out, next was a simple command to set Eutester on my machine:

python26 setup.py install

Well before we jump into executing our first sample test case let me point out here that Eutester provides various ways to you to feed in details on how Eutester can understand your cloud environment. Following are some of those ways (please note that there might exists other ways to get around but this post is to keep matters simple):

a) Using a cloud.conf config file

It is basically a simple text files having rows (lines) and columns. If you see the above you would find 2 lines describing the two machines in my cloud environment.

The sample cloud.conf is shown below

172.22.0.15 CENTOS 5.7 64 REPO [CC00 CLC SC00 WS]
172.22.0.16 CENTOS 5.7 64 REPO [NC00]

The column information is described in README.md file that came alone with the eutester code. But for the sake of completion of the post:

1. IP or hostname of the machine

2. Distribution installed on the machine

3. Distribution version on the machine

4. Distribution base architecture

5. System built from packages (REPO) or source (BZR) (packages assumes path to eucalyptus is /, bzr assumes path to eucalyptus is /opt/eucalyptus)

6. List of components installed on the machine

CLC – cloud controller
WS – Walrus
now that as eucalyptus can have a multi-cluster setup hence the following (specific to cluster)
SC00 – storage controller for cluster 00
CC00 – cluster controller for cluster 00
NC00 – node controller for cluster 00

b) Passing on the eucalyptus credential path, to the constructor. In my case the credentials were on the same machine as eutester so I had to only provide the path to the credentials.

Note that based on option (b) I wrote a very simple test case which runs an instance and then prints in some instance specific information.

from eucaops import Eucaops
if __name__ == '__main__':
    tester = Eucaops(credpath="/home/jeevanullas/.euca/")
    tester.exit_on_fail = 1
    image = tester.get_emi()
    reservation = tester.run_instance(image,keypair="sshlogin",group="linuxvms",type="m1.small")
    instance = reservation.instances[0]
    print "Instance Public IP address: " + instance.ip_address
    print "Instance Private IP address: " + instance.private_ip_address
    instance.terminate()

So what this test does (at a very high level) is that it connects to the CLC and then get one of the available EMI’s which is available and boots that up. Once the instance is up and running we print some basic information about the instance like the instance private ip address as well as public ip address. Finally we terminate the instance.

There are other things which can be done before we terminate the instance like executing a remote command on the instance and using the output internally in your test case? Lots of ideas.

The output for the script above is shown in the screenshot below

You can probably ignore some of the things like the boto debug stuff which is due to extensive logging enabled.

So if we summarize this post with our simple scripts here are the basic things which are pretty straight forward and Eutester takes care of

a) Takes care of getting your cloud credentials so that it can talk to your cloud and do stuff.

b) Next in order to run an instance on the cloud you need to provide EMI which Eutester gets for you based on the first available EMI and expects you to pass parameters like key pair to use for ssh logins and security group. Please note that these parameters are optional and are only required probably for a successful SSH connection to be established, infact SSH keypairs can be generated by Eutester before the instance is fired and can same can be used to while starting the instance as well as for further SSH connections inside Eutester.

Eutester is growing pretty fast thanks to Vic and Matt. Also Graziano already came up with an Eutester test case which is now part of Eutester and recreates bug 737335

There are various possibilities and lot of cool stuff happening around Eutester project. So I would suggest everyone to stay in touch and follow the project on:

Code
IRC Meetings
Projects Page

Some of you are probably pretty happy around now. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Yay, we’ve defeated SOPA and PIPA! Yay, victory us!!!”

Actually, you’ve lost. You’ve lost this war, because you… along with everyone else in this half-decayed republic of ours, allow a specific hot button issue to cloud your judgement and allow public sentiment to be unanimous concerning one specific topic.

Pedophiles.

You may be wondering what the hell Pedophiles have to do with Internet Censorship. The answer is; Everything. You cannot win, you are going to lose your internet freedom. You will be monitored, you will be followed and every act and idea you commit to the web will be logged and archived in the halls of Government.

All because you’re afraid of Pedophiles. If you aren’t, then maybe I am using the Royal “YOU” to comment on the public at large; the ignorant Baby Boomers who don’t understand the interwebs, the vacuous youth who haven’t learned the hard way that real opinions don’t make you many friends and often alienate you.

The sort of “YOU” that cannot argue that Pedophiles, just like Homosexuals, have a right to Exist.

It’s that “YOU” that is responsible for the death of the internet.

“But Wait, Heretic,” You might say. “The Net isn’t DEAD yet, we beat SOPA! We Beat PIPA!”

Wrong. You’ve insured your defeat. Consider the following;

http://investmentwatchblog.com/threatening-new-bill-worse-than-sopapipa-this-bill-entitled-the-protecting-children-from-internet-pornographers-act-of-2011-is-a-bill-with-overly-broadened-language-that-greatly-threatens-all/#.Tx0xqPk8d8G

No no. Follow the link. Copy-pasta if you must. You read it. You understand it… and realize that it is from the same corporate schill that propose SOPA and PIPA.

“What is this thing?” You might ask. Well if you’re part of the vast illiterati, I’ll explain you the thing (Bad grammar intentional).

H.R. 1981 is titled “The Protect Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011″.

It is a bill that requires the following; Your real, legal I.D. name, personal home address, IP address, browsing history, search terms you’ve searched and the complete details of your online habits are to be made trackable and must be logged by all ISP’s.

“Wait a second!” You might argue, “That has nothing to do with Children!”

At this point in the discussion is where I typically chime in with; I told you so.

For the last twelve years of my life, I’ve been arguing rationality in the face of rampant, frothing at the mouth hatred concerning Pedophiles and the various scaremongering news articles that are propogated and proliferated across the news media services and sites.

I recognized that this one topic, out of any topic, is where people lose any sense of proportion or reason; people cease thinking or functioning when a discussion starts involving, “People that diddle children”. Or people that might, hypothetically, because of pornography they look at, decide to diddle children.

“That’s monstrous, Heretic,” You might say. “Why would you defend people such as this?”

The answer is I am defending you. I am defending humanity, because if you allow a portion of humanity to become classified as sub-human, you allow the Government to abuse that concept for it’s own gain.

I am defending Pedophiles as human beings, because if I don’t, someone will be next. And then another. Who would it be? The Furries? People into BDSM? Japanese Hentai fans with their schoolgirl fetishes?

It turns out, no. They didn’t just move on to other fetishists and people with peculiar or abnormal paraphilias. They skipped them and decided to bilk the public.

Oh, fat surprise.

This bill will pass. It will pass because nobody in the Congress or House will vote against it. They won’t vote against it because it’s to protect children from Pedophiles.

And there you have it, folks. Because Pedophiles are universally reviled by society, you have your reason that all of your freedom gets to be stripped away.

Not because you are guilty, and it certainly isn’t because you might have child pornography on your computer.

H.R. 1981 isn’t for pornography, it’s the mechanism of control. It is the perfect tool to combat piracy, to punish the public and to create… as some writers would term it… Total Criminality.

You’re a criminal because you’re on the internet.

Who is to blame for this? You are. You are because you didn’t defend the most reviled people in society, did not argue for their rights, did not protect them from having their human rights stripped away.

You can blame yourself for the death of the Internet, because you never put yourself on the line to take the stand nobody else would take.

But I’m sure it’s fine. I’m sure you’re okay with this, because after all, some of you MIGHT be pedophiles.

So when your children ask you when the internet died, you can look them straight in the eyes and tell them it was murdered by everyone who couldn’t stand to think of Pedophiles existing on earth, and how the very idea of such a thing was enough for us to hand our betrayers the keys to the house.

If, on the other hand, you aren’t okay with this bill… I encourage you to fight against it. I say this while laughing, because good fucking luck; the entirety of the U.S. super-ego will crush you into a fine powder rather than hear anyone object to a bill protecting kids from Pedophiles.

Oh, and if you do want to fight the destruction of the internet, why don’t you share this with everyone you know. Print it and give it to your mum, pass it out to the elderly and the infirm, read it to your teenage children, make people understand.

Though I don’t have much hope of THAT happening.

This has been your Heresy of the Day.

Note: Repost of a diaspora update by The Heretic Of Ethics

Fedora free media ready to ship, a photo by Ankur Sinha: FranciscoD on Flickr.

Fedora free media ready to ship

• Design a chart to categorize the GCompris Activities : Walter designed a pretty interesting chart to categorize the gcompris activites using GNOME's diagram creation tool dia and Inkscape.


• Add SVG Image implementation example to PyGoocanvas code documentation : Isham added a SVG (Scalar Vector Graphics) image implementation example to the code documentation of PyGoocanvas.


• Add documentation for installation of gcompris from source : Timofey prepared a documentation for installation of GCompris on linux and added whatever was missing in the already existing manual.

ILUGC Monthly Meet (January 21 th):-
==============================

Time : Sat January 21, 2012 (3.00 – 5.30 PM)

Venue: Classroom No 3,
Areo Space Engineering,
Near Gajendra Circle,
IIT Madras.

Link for the Map: http://bit.ly/iit-aero

1.

Topic: Online Event Registration & Ticketing System

Description:

Allsymposium.com is a Free online event & management portal where Students & Academicians benefit by Creating, Configuring (with themes, background etc) ,Sharing with Social networking  sites, Online ticketing & Managing user registrations via My Dashboard their events like Seminars, Symposiums,Culturals,Workshops,Conference etc. You can have a look at
http://www.allsymposium.com

Speaker Profile: Senthil kumar [ sekumar123 AT gmail.com ]

Before moving in to Open Source Applications & technologies, he has worked in Several Industries and on various Proprietary Enterprise Applications for over a decade. Have Implemented large Scale projects across the Globe on various technologies. He is passionate about sharing his wealth of knowledge & experience through various Seminars & Workshops.  Allsymposium.com
is developed after understanding the difficulties faced by Students & Academicians in organizing and conducting events.

*Duration: *30-45 Min (A demo on the features of Allsymposium.com is included)

2.

Topic:  Introduction to Regular Expressions

In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for “matching” (specifying and recognizing) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for “regular expression” include “regex” and “regexp”. The concept of regular expressions was first popularized by utilities provided by Unix distributions, in particular the editor ed and the filter grep.[citation needed] A regular expression is written in a formal language that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor, which is a program that either serves as a parser generator or examines text and identifies parts that match the provided specification. Historically, the concept of regular expressions is associated with Kleene’s formalism of regular sets, introduced in the 1950s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Speaker : R Hariram Aatreya [ rhariram AT gmail.com ]

Hariram Aatreya is a computer engineer and Vedic scholar.

3.

Topics : Introducing Wikimedia India Chapter

Description:

The Wikimedia India Chapter (Registered Name: Wikimedia Chapter) is an independent and not-for-profit organization that supports, promotes and educate the general Indian public about the availability and use of free and open educational content, which includes the ability to access, develop and contribute to encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books, images, etc. It is an autonomous entity that does not have any editorial control over content on Wikipedia and its related projects. The Chapter does not have access to the servers hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation in the USA.

Wikimedia Chapters are independent organizations founded to support and promote Wikimedia projects within a country. Chapters are formed by people from within the community and enable volunteers to take their work beyond what they can do individually, besides providing the benefit of a formal organisational set-up. While independent, chapters are recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikimedia India was formally approved by the Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation after the recommendation of the Chapters Committee in June 2010 and India became the 29th country to host a Wikimedia Chapter. The Wikimedia Chapter was formally registered as a Non-profit Society vide Registrar of Societies, Bangalore Urban District on 03 Jan 2011.

http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Main_Page

Duration: 30 Mins

Speaker : Surya Prakash [ suryasalem2010 AT gmail DOT com ]

About Speaker :

Surya Prakash, is a second year, Mechanical Engineering student at Anna University.
He contributes to Tamil wikipedia and wikimedia community.

http://tawp.in/r/1nmq

4.

General group discussions on any queries, events etc.
CDs/DVDs can be shared on prior request.
Announce this to all your friends, social network sites etc.

All are welcome. Entry Free

As you all know, RMS visit is happening on 6th Feb. FSFTN is
conducting a meeting of all GLUGs in and around Chennai on Jan 22nd.
Meeting will happen in IIT-Madras CS-32. We request all the GLUGs to
participate in the meeting to discuss regarding organizing the event.

If your college do not have a GLUG and you would like to be part of
the organizing team for RMS visit, please contact us. All Free
Software enthusiasts who are interested in this may please mail or
call us.

Time: 10-00 am – 12.00 am

Contact:
shanu@fsftn.org 9884792347
alagunambiwelkin@fsftn.org 9962240050

Please forward this to all Free Software and public mailing lists you know of.

The Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu(FSFTN) is proud to announce the visit of Richard Matthew Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, to Chennai on February 6, 2012. Mr. Stallman (or rms as he is popularly known) is an iconic figure in the global movement to ensure that the free flow of knowledge and through this, the fostering of innovation and newer technologies.

As founder of the GNU project and the FSF and also as one of the pioneers of the idea of ‘Copyleft‘ , he has contributed majorly to revolutionising the field of software by imagining and creating an alternative to the world of proprietary software and technology. Mr. Stallman’s visit to Chennai, after a considerable gap, will be an excellent occasion for the academicians, students and professionals of the city to gain inspiration and advice from a legendary figure and also interact with fellow enthusiasts, all of which, we are sure, will be a life-changing experience for many.

The Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu, has been constantly striving to spread awareness of the importance and advantages of free software in various fields such as education, public policy and health care. Our activities include workshops, community computing centres and partnerships with institutions in the use and promotion of free software. It is in this context that we are honoured to host such a famous figure.

This would be an ideal opportunity to like-minded groups, organizations, technical groups, users groups, and its members in and around Chennai to join hands and utilize this opportunity to spread the knowledge on Free Software to as many people as we can. If you as an individual feel you can help us in any possible means, we would be happy to have you with us.

If you or your organization is interested in sponsoring this event, we have a variety of sponsorship options that you can consider. Do contact us off-list to know more details.

More details will be announced soon.Please stay tuned to our mailing-list [ http://ilugc.in ] or this blog.

For any information or queries please feel free to call us at, Shanu: 9884792347, Prasanth: 9176661086, Welkin: 9962240050.

Advanced Linux Shell Scripting Work shop is happening on Jan 28th and Jan 29th (2 days workshop) in Chennai.
This Work shop will give full hands on experience from basic till advanced scripting. At the end of the session you will be able to write a shell scripts with configuration files.

PPT:
http://www.usedisk.com/downloads/277_Advanced_Shell_Scripting_ppt_2012_01_19

About the Instructor:

Instructor has 10 years experience in Linux. He has written many real time
automation scripts and tools which is running on many production servers
around the world.

Interested people please contact “Madeeswer V” <madhiv@gmail.com> The entry will be based on first come
first serve.

Location:Chennai
Venue: Spiro Technologies,T.Nagar.

Cost: 4499 /-

Sikuli is a cross-platform automation tool. The software uses computer vision technology to automate UI testing.

In this blog post I describe how to install and setup Sikuli on Ubuntu 11.10 OS.

Download the latest version of Sikuli (http://sikuli.org/download.shtml) and uncompress the zip file. You can also install Sikuli using Ubuntu package manager.

$ sudo apt-get install sikuli-ide

You will need OpenCV 2.1 or later to use Sikuli. If you see the following error, the OpenCV libraries are probably missing on your computer.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /tmp/tmplib/libVisionProxy.so: libml.so.2.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Install OpenCV 2.3 on Ubuntu 11.10

Thanks to Gijs Molenaar we now have OpenCV 2.3 packages for Ubuntu. You can find full installation documentation here.

Open terminal and type the following commands to install OpenCV 2.3 packages. Remember to uninstall older OpenCV versions before you do this.

  $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/cuda
  $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gijzelaar/opencv2.3
  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install libcv-dev

Other Required Tools

The Sikuli documentation fails to mention that you need wmctrl package to launch and control GUI applications on Linux.

 $ sudo apt-get install wmctrl 

You are done!

You can now launch Sikuli by typing /usr/bin/sikuli-ide in the terminal program.

There are in fact some advantages blogspot has. The blog-specific
search is one thing (G+ will search the whole world so you have to add
your name or something to make it focus on your "stream" or whatever
the heck they call it).

The URL itself is a big turnoff in G+. Compare blogspot's
http://sitaramc.blogspot.com/2011/07/veracity.html to G+'s
https://plus.google.com/115609618223925128756/posts/PDPdXTxAvZk.
Uggh!

In fact the only reason I'm moving there is because my online world
has now pretty much reduced to git, gitolite, and related areas. And
most of those people are on G+. I reach, and am reached by, so many
more people there, it's an enormous difference from blogspot.

Well it’s been really really long since I updated this space but looks like the right time to change a few things around starting with a new post in a new year!

This post basically summarizes 2011 for me and ends with the latest news which comes with the new year. For a better understanding of things I am categorizing it into sections

Travel
I was able to visit some pretty nice places during vacation, some of them which I would like to mention here are Mekedaatu, Pondicherry and some of the worst places like Hogenakkal. Compared to 2010 though 2011 was pretty dull, hope to improve that in 2012.

Work at Infosys
Lot of cool and exciting things happened last year at Infosys which I might not be able to tell here. I worked with some of “the” awesome people inside the organization on things I love to work on (Cloud Computing, Linux, Sysadmin etc).
The journey at Infosys for me finally came to an end on 12/26/2011. It was a joy ride full of good as well as bad experiences but overall speaking at the end of the day lot of learning. Planning on to be in touch with some of the real gems still there, all of you (you know who you are) guys you rock and I wish you all a very happy new year!

Family
No new additions to the family which is pretty cool. Keeps thing simple. Brother got placed at Salesforce and is now based out of Hyderabad. The house in Jaipur got renovated again this time it was turn of the ground floor. My visits to home (Jaipur) and Jodhpur (Birthplace) were really nice spent a healthy time with my cousins and relatives which I would consider real good.

Bangalore
Bangalore as usual was great in 2011 though technically speaking I lived outside Bangalore for most part of it. I was not able to catch up with the Linux-India folks most of the time (though was able to show up on few rare occasions and catch up), I really would like to change that in 2012 once I am back in town later this year.

Technology
Got real hands-on experience with exciting stuff both in open source (Cloudstack, KVM, Spacewalk) and non-open source (HP Cloudsystem matrix, IBM Service Delivery Manager, VMWare vsphere, Amazon web services) domain. Compared to 2010 it was much more action packed year and cloud really grew pretty fast.
Apple as well as OS X continues to dominate my personal computing needs and I predict the same would get stronger and deeper in 2012.
I was not of able to contribute to the community, I have been part of, specially Fedora Project , Linux User Group Jaipur and Eucalyptus (sort off) but was able to change couple of things around that too by the end of the year at-least on the Eucalyptus front lot of cool stuff started happening.

Future and 2012
The big news which I guess most of the people (in my circles) have been waiting to hear on, where do I move on to now? Now that I am out of Infosys and Bangalore (for a while). Well guys I am glad to share with you the news that I have joined Eucalyptus Inc. and the great army of fellow Eucalyptoids spread across the world. As part of my job I would be working within the Technical services team focused on Customer support and also be the community guy for Eucalyptus, which in my opinion is going to get strong this year and the years to come.
I have already started off with my journey at Eucalyptus and the 1st week itself has been so far full of exciting stuff focused around open source, Eucalyptus community and Eucalyptus 3.

In case you are interested to get associated with the Eucalyptus community and exciting things which we have been doing for a while now, feel free to get in touch and be part of the ecosystem. For IRC users we (jeevan_ullas and others) can be found at #eucalyptus on irc.freenode.net.

So on a positive note let me wish you all a very happy new year full of Clouds powered by Open Source and please do stay in touch!

On January 18th 2012 popular Internet websites protested the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act with blackout-ed splash pages .

Erin Jo Richey captured some of the websites on her Flickr photostream.

Wikipedia, Google, Reddit and several other major sites are protesting the PIPA/SOPA legislation by either completely blacking out their sites or by modifying their front pages to inform their visitors of this harmful legislation that the MPAA is trying get the U.S. Congress to pass. I’m proud that Mozilla will be also be participating in the ‘internet strike’ tomorrow!

I’ve rarely discussed politics on my blog, and as an Indian citizen I am particularly helpless to do anything about U.S. legislation. Mitchell and many others have already posted level-headed arguments on why PIPA/SOPA isn’t going to help anyone. However, this response from the MPAA’s chief executive Chris Dodd (who is, notably, a former US Senator) really irks me:

Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together, some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals. It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.

The MPAA has, in the past, used its “power” to enact legislation that makes it illegal to manufacture DVD players that allow lawful, paying consumers to skip the FBI warning shown at the beginning of DVDs. The MPAA is now using that very same “power” and political clout to enact PIPA/SOPA. It is plainly hypocritical that the MPAA would call Google and Wikipedia irresponsible for displaying accurate information on their own websites.

Furthermore, the MPAA calls out for “co-operation” from technology companies on the matter of piracy. I am at a loss to understand why Google or any other technology company should spend even a cent of their hard-earned money on solving a problem for the MPAA. Why didn’t the MPAA use its enormous cash pile on technology that would enable them to profit from evolving technology instead of spending it all on lobbying a bill that threatens the Internet’s very existence?

The retort from the MPAA is that they’re not against the Internet, just piracy. However, that’s exactly where the problem lies. The PIPA/SOPA bills as currently drafted would give the MPAA (a private entity, mind you) the overarching power to shut down any website, without legal recourse, all in the name of combating piracy. Even if I trust the executives at the MPAA to not abuse that power, I do not fool myself into thinking that there will be no mistakes at all. Taking down a website for no real legal reason, even temporarily, is just not worth it – especially when the end goal is to let the MPAA make an extra million dollars.

Thankfully, the Internet is not designed to let any single entity obtain that much power (one could note that it is that distributed nature of the Internet that makes it so successful). Even if the bill is enacted, it will not prevent people from being able to reach these “rogue” websites that publish pirated content. Consumers will still be able to reach websites not hosted in the U.S. (as most of them are) via their direct IP address, and site owners can always be a step ahead by registering new domain names if they choose to. Not to mention, the Streisand Effect is likely to swing into action, further fueling the trend of people visiting rogue websites for pirated content. For example, it is trivial to write an add-on for Firefox and other browsers that would bypass the DNS “blacklisting” technique PIPA and SOPA propose to implement. There is no way that the MPAA, the U.S. Government, or any single entity for that matter, can stay on top of thousands of such work-arounds.

The technology companies and architects of the internet have openly informed the MPAA about the fallacies of the bill (something that they couldn’t figure out for themselves); for the MPAA to expect any more “co-operation” from them is futile.

Nobody in their right mind has ever said that piracy is not a problem. However, the benefits that the Internet brings to humanity is far too much to let a private corporation endanger it just so it can continue to profit. In the long run, for any corporation to stay in business, it must adapt to evolving technology. Digital goods are just not the same as physical objects, bits have no colour. The companies that realize this fundamental, unchangeable truth and try to capitalize on technology are the ones who will ultimately succeed, not the ones who try to fight it. In the physical realm, we don’t outlaw things that brings a lot more good to society even if you are able to do a few bad things with it (though increasingly governments seem to punish the masses in the name of fighting a few bad apples; which is also no doubt a very troubling phenomenon). I hope the MPAA will use its power and money to figure out how it can profit from technology in a way that preserves the founding principles of the internet, for its own sake, or it won’t be too long before someone who does replaces them.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

After my previous attempt the other day to create a nested-guest(kvm on kvm) with Intel arch, I got hold of an AMD server machine with virt-extensions enabled and gave it a whirl. This went slightly smoother than the Intel attempt.

Some config info about the physical host, regular-guest and nested-guest. (All of them are Fedora-16; x86_64)

• Physical Host (Host hypervisor/Bare metal)

• 
  [root@phy-host-amd]# virsh nodeinfo
  CPU model:           x86_64
  CPU(s):              16
  CPU frequency:       2000 MHz
  CPU socket(s):       2
  Core(s) per socket:  8
  Thread(s) per core:  1
  NUMA cell(s):        1
  Memory size:         8173352 kB
  

• Regualr Guest (Or Guest Hypervisor)
• Config: 4GB Memory; 6 vcpus; 22GB Raw disk image w/ cache=’none’ enabled in the libvirt xml
• Nested Guest
• Config: 2GB Memory; 3 vcpus; 10G Raw disk image

Ensure nesting is enabled on the physical host

Let’s ensure kvm_amd kernel module is enabled with ‘nested’ virt.

[root@phy-host-amd ~]# modinfo kvm_amd | grep -i nested
parm:           nested:int
[root@phy-host-amd ~]# 

[root@phy-host-amd ~]# cat /sys/module/kvm_amd/parameters/nested
1
[root@phy-host-amd ~]# 

[root@phy-host-amd ~]# systool -m kvm_amd -v   | grep -i nested
    nested              = "1"
[root@phy-host-amd ~]#

CAVEAT: To make life a little easier, I configured bridged networking on the physical host to ensure our regular-guest gets a bridged IP; and later, nested-guest gets a NATed IP. I’m noting it here because, the physical host initially had no bridging. The default libvirt bridge virbr0 has 192.168.122.0/24 IP space. So once we set up the regular-guest(or guest-hypervisor), we’ll end up having the same IP space. I tried to fix this prob. by creating another ‘persistent’ libvirt network interface and enabled autostart of it. [virsh net-add; virsh net-define; virsh net-autostart ]. But, it wasn’t elegant and messed up networks on reboot.

Set up the guest hypervisor
Create a minimal regular-guest using virt-install . The one I used is posted here

Now, add the cpu attribute to the regular-guest’s libvirt xml to expose AMD’s svm instructions, which comes with Opteron_G3 model .

Edit the xml using virsh:

# virsh edit regualr-guest 

(which will also define the xml)

Here is the attribute to be added to the guest hypervisor’s libvirt xml:

   <cpu>
      <arch>x86_64</arch>
      <model>Opteron_G3</model>
      <vendor>AMD</vendor>
      <topology sockets='2' cores='8' threads='1'/>
      <feature name='wdt'/>
      <feature name='skinit'/>
      <feature name='osvw'/>
      <feature name='3dnowprefetch'/>
      <feature name='cr8legacy'/>
      <feature name='extapic'/>
      <feature name='cmp_legacy'/>
      <feature name='3dnow'/>
      <feature name='3dnowext'/>
      <feature name='pdpe1gb'/>
      <feature name='fxsr_opt'/>
      <feature name='mmxext'/>
      <feature name='ht'/>
      <feature name='vme'/>
    </cpu>

And, restarted the regular-guest, so that it boots w/ the -cpuflag which the AMD virt extensions:

[root@phy-host-amd ~]# ps -ef | grep -i qemu-kvm
qemu     26677     1 14 10:39 ?        00:00:30 /usr/bin/qemu-kvm -S -M pc-0.14 -cpu phenom,+wdt,+skinit,+osvw,+3dnowprefetch,+misalignsse,+sse4a,+abm,+cr8legacy,+extapic,+cmp_legacy,+lahf_lm,+rdtscp,+pdpe1gb,+popcnt,+cx16,+ht,+vme -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 6,sockets=2,cores=8,threads=1 -name regular-guest -uuid 8f6a4478-496b-51d8-2de2-ff7fdb964af3 -nographic -nodefconfig -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/regular-guest.monitor,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/regular-guest.img,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=raw,cache=none -device virtio-blk-pci,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1 -netdev tap,fd=24,id=hostnet0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:5f:c6:5f,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3 -chardev pty,id=charserial0 -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0 -usb -device usb-tablet,id=input0 -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5

Now, let’s fetch the IP of the regular-guest using virt-cat

[root@phy-host-amd ~]# virsh list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  5 regular-guest        running
[root@phy-host-amd ~]#
[root@phy-host-amd ~]# virt-cat regular-guest /var/log/messages | grep 'dhclient.*bound to'
Jan 17 10:13:06 dhcpyy-zz dhclient[732]: bound to ww.xx.yy.zz -- renewal in 32578 seconds.

(Note: ‘ww.xx.yy.zz’ above will be a bridged IP address)

Create the nested guest
Now. install virt-packages in the regular-guest. Also, let’s check if the /dev/kvm char device is exposed in the regular-guest ; and start the libvirtd service.

[root@regular-guest ~]# file /dev/kvm
/dev/kvm: character special
[root@regular-guest ~]# systemctl status libvirtd.service
libvirtd.service - LSB: daemon for libvirt virtualization API
          Loaded: loaded (/etc/rc.d/init.d/libvirtd)
          Active: active (running) since Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:49:25 -0500; 5s ago
         Process: 1440 ExecStart=/etc/rc.d/init.d/libvirtd start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
        Main PID: 1448 (libvirtd)
          CGroup: name=systemd:/system/libvirtd.service
                  ├ 1448 libvirtd --daemon
                  └ 1501 /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --strict-order --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/libvirt/network/default.pid --conf-file= --exce...

Proceed with installing a minimal F16 nested-guest w/ virt-install. The script I used is here

Debugging note: Once the guest install is finished, fix the serial console access by disabling plymouth-service using this workaround. This will let us login via virsh serial console(to get kernel and boot messages) w/o any line breaks while entering credentials:

 # ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/system/plymouth-start.service

Get the (NATed) IP of the nested-guest. (Also, grepped for the qemu-kvm command-line of the nested-guest.)

[root@regular-guest ~]# virsh list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  2 nested-guest         running
[root@regular-guest ~]# ps -ef | grep qemu-kvm
qemu      2245     1  2 Jan17 ?        00:20:11 /usr/bin/qemu-kvm -S -M pc-0.14 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -smp 3,sockets=3,cores=1,threads=1 -name nested-guest -uuid 2aae2ab5-ddb6-2585-aa16-7fe97296f34b -nographic -nodefconfig -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/nested-guest.monitor,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/nested-guest.img,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=raw -device virtio-blk-pci,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1 -netdev tap,fd=24,id=hostnet0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:0e:4e:53,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3 -chardev pty,id=charserial0 -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0 -usb -device usb-tablet,id=input0 -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5

[root@regular-guest ~]# virt-cat nested-guest /var/log/messages | grep 'dhclient.*bound to'
Jan 17 11:08:30 localhost dhclient[721]: bound to 192.168.122.220 -- renewal in 1393 seconds.
[root@regular-guest ~]#

SSh into the nested-guest, install virt-what package and run to see if we’re on a hypervisor

[root@localhost ~]# cat /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 16 (Verne)
[root@localhost ~]# ifconfig eth0 | grep inet
          inet addr:192.168.122.220  Bcast:192.168.122.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::5054:ff:fe0e:4e53/64 Scope:Link
[root@localhost ~]#
[root@localhost ~]# virt-what
kvm

Wooo!! so we’re on an OS which is inside an OS which is inside an OS.

Hi there!

As promised, I’m going to repeat the VIM class for beginners tomorrow at
2100 IST (1530 UTC) to suit APAC. I’m going to cover more or less the
same points I covered in the initial class. Please try and make it

The venue of course, is #fedora-classroom on Freenode.

To convert this time to your local time:

> date -d "Wed Jan 18 15:30:00 UTC 2012"

I wrote a book on OpenSource in Tamil and it got published by New Horizon Media (Kizhakku Pathipagam) on last Saturday ie., 07-jan-2012 in Chennai Book Fair 2012. If you get a chance to visit Chennai Book fair drop in at Kizhakku Pathipagam stall and grab a copy of the book
(shortly the book will be available in http://www.nhm.in/ online store).

An introduction about this book is available here - http://www.tamilpaper.net/?p=5347

Some context: In regular virtualization, your physical linux host is the hypervisor, and runs multiple operating systems. Nested Virtualization let’s you run a guest inside a regular guest(essentially a Guest hypervisor).For AMD there is nested-support available since a while, and some people reported success w/ nesting KVM guests. For Intel arch., there is support available recently, an year-ish, and some in progress work, so thought I’d give it a whirl when Adam Young started discussion about it in context of openstack project.

Some of the common use-cases for that are being discussed for nested-virtualization
- For instance, a cloud user gets a beefy, Regualar Guest(which she completely controls). Now, this user can turn regular guest into a hypervisor, and can cheerfully run/manage multiple guests for developing or testing w/o the hassle and intervention of the cloud provider.
- Possibility of having a many instances of virtualization setup (hypervisor and its guests) on one single Bare metal.
- Ability to debug and test hypervisor software

I have immediate access to a moderately beefy Intel hardware, and rest of the post is based on Intel’s CPU virt extensions. Before proceeding, let’s settle on some terminology for clarity:

• Physical Host (Host hypervisor/Bare metal)
• Config: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU(4 cores/socket); 10GB Memory; CPU Freq – 2GHz; Running latest Fedora-16(Minimal foot-print, @core only with Virt pkgs;x86_64; kernel-3.1.8-2.fc16.x86_64
• Regualr Guest (Or Guest Hypervisor)
• Config: 4GB Memory; 4vCPU; 20GB Raw disk image with cache =’none’ to have decent I/O; Minimal, @core F16; And same virt-packages as Physical Host; x86_64
• Nested Guest (Guest installed inside the Regular Guest)
• Config: 2GB Memory; 1vCPU; Minimal(@core only) F16; x86_64

Enabling Nesting on the Physical Host

Node Info of the Physical Host.

 
# virsh nodeinfo
CPU model:           x86_64
CPU(s):              4
CPU frequency:       1994 MHz
CPU socket(s):       1
Core(s) per socket:  4
Thread(s) per core:  1
NUMA cell(s):        1
Memory size:         10242864 kB

Let us first ensure kvm_intel kernel module has nesting enabled. By default, it’s disabled for Intel arch[ but enabled for AMD -- SVM (secure virtual machine) extensions arch.]

 
# modinfo kvm_intel | grep -i nested
parm:           nested:bool
#

And, we need to pass this kvm-intel.nested=1 on kernel commandline while rebooting the host to enable nesting for the Intel KVM kernel module. Which can be verified after boot by doing:

 
# cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/nested
Y
# systool -m kvm_intel -v   | grep -i nested
    nested              = "Y"
#

Or alternatively, Adam Young identified that nesting can be enabled by adding this directive kvm_intel nested=1 to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/dist.conf file and reboot the host so it persists.

Set up the Regular Guest(or Guest hypervisor)
Install a regular guest using virt-install or oz tool or any other preferred way. I made a quick script here. And ensure to have cache=’none’ in the disk attribute of the Guest Hypervisor’s xml file. (observation: Install via virt-install tool didn’t seem have this option picked by default.) Here is the ‘drive’ attribute libvirt xml snippet:

    <disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/regular-guest.img'/>
      <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x04' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>

Now, let’s try to enable Intel VMX(Virtual Machine Extensions) in the regular guest’s CPU. We can do it by running the below on the Physical host(aka Host Hypervisor), and adding the ‘cpu’ attribute to the regular-guest’s libvirt xml file, and start the guest.

# virsh  capabilities | virsh cpu-baseline /dev/stdin
<cpu match='exact'>
  <model>Penryn</model>
  <vendor>Intel</vendor>
  <feature policy='require' name='dca'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='xtpr'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='tm2'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='vmx'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='ds_cpl'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='monitor'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='pbe'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='tm'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='ht'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='ss'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='acpi'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='ds'/>
  <feature policy='require' name='vme'/>
</cpu>

The o/p of the above cmd has a variety of options. Since we need only vmx extensions, I tried the simple way by adding to the regular-guest’s libvirt xml(virsh edit ..) and started it.

<cpu match='exact'>
  <model>core2duo</model>
 <feature policy='require' name='vmx'/>
</cpu>

Thanks to Jiri Denemark for the above hint. Also note that, there is a very detailed and informative post from Dan P Berrange on host/guest CPU models in libvirt.

As we enabled vmx in the guest-hypervisor, let’s confirm that vmx is exposed in the emulated CPU by ensuring qemu-kvm is invoked with -cpu core2duo,+vmx :

[root@physical-host ~]# ps -ef | grep qemu-kvm
qemu     17102     1  4 22:29 ?        00:00:34 /usr/bin/qemu-kvm -S -M pc-0.14
-cpu core2duo,+vmx -enable-kvm -m 3072
-smp 3,sockets=3,cores=1,threads=1 -name f16test1
-uuid f6219dbd-f515-f3c8-a7e8-832b99a24b5d -nographic -nodefconfig
-nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/f16test1.monitor,server,nowait
-mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -no-shutdown
-drive file=/export/vmimgs/f16test1.img,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=raw,cache=none
-device virtio-blk-pci,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1
-netdev tap,fd=21,id=hostnet0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=52:54:00:e6:cc:4e,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3 -chardev pty,id=charserial0 -device isa-serial,chardev=charserial0,id=serial0 -usb -device usb-tablet,id=input0 -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5

Now, let’s attempt to create a nested guest

Here comes the more interesting part, the nested-guest config. will be 2G RAM; 1vcpu; 8GB virtual disk. And let’s invoke a virt-install cmdline with a minimal kickstart install:

[root@regular-guest ~]# virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
    --network=bridge:virbr0 \
    --initrd-inject=/root/fed.ks \
   --extra-args=ks=file:/fed.ks console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 serial rd_NO_PLYMOUTH \
    --name=nested-guest --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/nested-guest.img,size=6 \
    --ram 2048 \
    --vcpus=1 \
    --check-cpu \
    --hvm \
    --location=http://download.foo.bar.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/16/Fedora/x86_64/os/
    --nographics

Starting install...
Retrieving file .treeinfo...                                                                                                 | 1.7 kB     00:00 ...
Retrieving file vmlinuz...                                                                                                   | 7.9 MB     00:08 ...
Retrieving file initrd.img...                               28% [==============                                   ] 647 kB/s |  38 MB     02:25 ETA

virt-install proceeds fine(to a certain extent), doing all regular things like getting access to network, create devices, create file-systems, dep checks performed, and finally package install proceeds:

Welcome to Fedora for x86_64

     ┌─────────────────────┤ Package Installation ├──────────────────────┐
     │                                                                   │
     │                                                                   │
     │                                 24%                               │
     │                                                                   │
     │                   Packages completed: 52 of 390                   │
     │                                                                   │
     │ Installing glibc-common-2.14.90-14.x86_64 (112 MB)                │
     │ Common binaries and locale data for glibc                         │
     │                                                                   │
     │                                                                   │
     │                                                                   │
     └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

And now, it’s stuck like that for ever. Doesn’t budge, trying to install pkgs for eternity. Let’s try to see what’s the state of the guest in a seperate terminal

[root@regular-guest ~]# virsh list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  1 nested-guest         paused

[root@regular-guest ~]#
[root@regular-guest ~]#  virsh domstate nested-guest --reason
paused (unknown)

[root@regular-guest ~]#

So our nested-guest seems to be paused, And package install on the nested-guest’s serial console is still hung. I gave up at this point. Need to try if I can get any helpful info w/ virt-dmesg tool aor any other ways to debug this further.

Just to note, there is enough disk space and memory on the ‘regular-guest’, so that case is ruled out here. And, I tried to destroy the broken nested-guest, and attempted to create a fresh one(repeated twice). Still no dice.

So not much luck yet with Intel arch, I’d have to try on an AMD machine.

UPDATE(on Intel arch): After trying a couple of times, I was finally able to ssh to the nested guest, but, after a reboot, the nested-guest loses the IP rendering it inaccessible.(Info: the regular-guest has a bridged IP, and nested-guest has a NATed IP) . And I couldn’t login via serial-console, as it’s broken due to a regression(which has a workaround). Also, refer to comments below for further discussion on NATed networking caveats.

I wanted to experiment with Ruby bindings of Apache Qpid.

Lets install the the server and client:

$ sudo yum install qpid-cpp-server ruby-qpid qpid-tools
$ service qpidd start

Now check which version of Ruby bindings have we installed here:

$ rpm -qi ruby-qpid
Name        : ruby-qpid
Version     : 0.8
Release     : 2.fc15
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Fri 13 Jan 2012 06:21:55 PM IST
Group       : Development/Ruby
Size        : 219877
License     : ASL 2.0
Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Wed 27 Jul 2011 06:41:06 PM IST, Key ID 067f00b6a82ba4b7
Source RPM  : ruby-qpid-0.8-2.fc15.src.rpm
Build Date  : Wed 09 Feb 2011 03:48:16 PM IST
Build Host  : x86-11.phx2.fedoraproject.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
URL         : http://qpid.apache.org/
Summary     : Ruby language client for AMQP
Description :
The Apache Qpid project's Ruby language client for AMQP.

Okay, now lets create a simple script and send some messages.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# file: qpid-test.rb
require 'qpid'

host = "localhost"
port = 5672
address = "amq.topic"
spec_marshal_file = "/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/qpid/spec_cache/amqp.0-10-qpid-errata.rb_marshal"
spec_object = Marshal.load(File.open(spec_marshal_file).read())

socket = TCPSocket.new(host, port)
connection = Qpid::Connection.new(socket, :spec => spec_object)
puts "Connection instance created..."

connection.open

puts "Connection instance opened..."

session    = connection.create_session
puts "Session initiated..."

receiver   = session.create_receiver address
puts "Receiver object created..."

sender     = session.create_sender address
puts "Sender object created..."


sender.send Qpid::Message.new :content => "Hello world!"

message = receiver.fetch Qpid::Messaging::Duration::SECOND
puts "#{message.content}"
session.acknowledge
connection.close

On running the script we should get a “Hello world!” message.

$ ruby qpid-test.rb
Connection instance created...
qpid-test.rb:13qpid-test.rb:13: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.7 (2011-06-30 patchlevel 352) [x86_64-linux]

Aborted (core dumped)

This is not what we expected. What is wrong here? Perhaps a bug in the Ruby bindings.

Then I went to the source code repository of Ruby bindings on github.com:

https://github.com/apache/qpid/tree/trunk/qpid/cpp/bindings/qpid/ruby

According to the instructions I installed the latest bindings:

$ sudo gem install qpid

And removed the one I installed earlier

$ yum erase ruby-qpid

Now thats funny because the gem I ended up installing using the command is:

http://rubygems.org/gems/qpid

QPID (Queriable Patient Inference Dossier, developed at Massachusetts General Hospital), which is not even related to Apache Qpid.

How am I supposed to installed the latest Ruby bindings for Apache Qpid client?

Hi all,

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2012 !!!

Wikimedians in Bangalore cordially invites you to attend the Wikipedia 11th anniversary celebrations in Bangalore !

15th January 2012 is the 11th Anniversary of Wikipedia !

The Wikimedia India Chapter turned one year on 3rd Jan 2012 !

Join us to celebrate the Wikipedia anniversary at the 41st Wiki-meetup in Bangalore.

And Cake – cutting too !

Date : Sunday, 15-January-2012 Time: 4:00 PM IST

Venue : The Centre for Internet and Society, No. 194, , 2nd ‘C’ Cross, 4th Main Domlur 2nd Stage , Opposite to Domlur Club, Bangalore 560 071 Karnataka

Agenda :
Introductions.
Welcoming , and About Wikipedia 11 and other Wikipedia Projects
15 Minute Google hangout with all cities that are doing parallel events at the same time 4:30 PM
Wikimedia India Chapter – 1 year
Launch of Wikimedia Portals -
Cake Cutting
More details : http://wiki.wikimedia.in/WikiMeetups/Bangalore/Bangalore41
https://www.facebook.com/events/327765823923926/ ( Facebook invite)

7 other Indian cities are also celebrating …. Are you attending? http://wiki.wikimedia.in/Eleven

Regards
Tinu Cherian

( P.S. Feel Free to forward this to your friends, colleagues and other possibly interested mailing lists)

#Transifex now supports comments in Apple .strings i18n files. Only /* foo */ style comment in the line preceding the key value pair in the source file is saved as a comment for the key. The example below will explain this in a better way:

/*Comment for key1*/
"key1" = "value 1";

/* This comment will not be
included in key2*/

/* comment for
key2*/
"key2" = "value 2";

/* this comment will not be included in key3*/

"key3" = "value 3";

Comment for a source string imported from a source Apple .strings file