This is a read-only archived version of wiki.centos.org

CentOS Dojo Brussels, Belgium, Friday 30th January 2015

A one day sysadmin centric learning and sharing experience

Registration

Register now at http://centosdojobrussels2015.eventbrite.co.uk In order to keep the sessions productive and encourage discussion, the number of seats are limited. We encourage early registration to ensure availability. On the evening of the event, we will likely head out for some drinks in the area, please let us know on the registration page if you are able to make it for that, so we can plan for capacity. Please note, we have much lesser capacity this year at Brussels than we did in 2014.

Agenda and Speakers

The day long event starts at 9:00am and closes by 5:00pm, at which point we will all head into the Fosdem Drinks sessions. We have two tracks on the day, with lots of breaks and conversation opportunities. And while there are some talks, a large part of the content will be interactive or tutorial format, so bring your laptop along.

This Dojo is going to focus on hands on, tutorial and demo like sessions. We have two rooms on the day, one being devoted to sysadmin and sysadmin practises and the second one dedicated to virtualisation and cloud. The Cloud room will have more tutorials, and therefore lesser overall sessions.

Sessions

CentOS Install methods review :: Fabian Arrotin

A quick overview of all the possibilities and some tools we can use to deploy/update/maintain CentOS. Having to test something in a temporary VM on your laptop ? having to deploy a complete DC ? having to speed things up for new installations ? from bare-metal to containers .

Depending on the network setup at the Dojo, we'll try to review some of those installation methods and demo that too.

• Slides

Guide to Software Collections :: Honza Horak

A short introduction to Software Collections (SCL) technology that is comming to CentOS by SCLo SIG. SCL allows you to deliver and use more versions of one application stacks on one system.

Participants will learn what is behind SCL technology and a short tutorial will cover converting an ordinary RPM into an SCL-enabled RPM. In the end, people attending the talk will understand how to use SCL packages and how to prepare their own packages to extend an existing collection.

Some info about presenter: Honza Horak works in Red Hat, mainly responsible for delivering and keeping databases in a good shape. Also actively participating in Software Collections development and delivering databases packages as SCL packages.

Slides for this session are available at : scl-hhorak-centos.pdf Video of this session is now online at : https://www.youtube.com/video/8TmK2g9amj4

Pulp Project, HowTo Manage RPM Repositories :: Julien Pivotto

In this hands on demo, Julien will cover: - What is pulp? How does it work? - Mirrors management - Repositories workflows - RPM's deployment and release management

Julien Pivotto is an Open-Source Consultant at Inuits, and has been using Pulp to manage self-hosted rpm repositories for many of their customers as well as internally in the company.

Video for this session is now live at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkhCvNXWMC4 Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/roidelapluie/an-introduction-to-the-pulp-project

Tuning the Xen Hypervisor for Optimal Performance :: Dario Faggioli

As we all know, the Xen hypervisor powers some of the largest and most popular public cloud services. Hence, the session could be useful to people wanting to tune and optimise their instances and the workload they're sending to the Cloud.

In fact, Xen has several options and different kinds of guests. The talk would describe the various types of guests supported by Xen, give insights about their respective strengths and weaknesses and advise under what circumstances, and with what parameters, one should use each one of them, in order to achieve the best possible performance.

Of course, some of what is happening with the CentOS Virt SIG would be mentioned, and I'd be available to try providing insights and answering questions about it, although I'm not directly involved in it.

About me, I'm a Citrix employee, paid to work 100% on my time on Xen as an Open Source project. I'm in the same team as Roger, the guy that gave a talk similar to this at previous Dojos.

Optimising Xen Deployments for Storage Performance :: Felipe Franciosi

This would include a review of the available storage backends for Xen (e.g. tapdisk, qemu, blkback) and their characteristics when used on different types of storage (e.g. FC/iSCSI/NFS, HDDs, SSDs). I will follow with available tools for monitoring storage performance and diagnosing problems on various deployments. Provided (reasonable) internet access is available, most of the presentation will be hands-on on live systems using cutting edge storage platforms. If not, I will use a laptop to run the tutorial and compare storage types such as a local SSD and an external (slow) USB drive.

After the talk, I expect the audience to be well-versed in:

• Understanding the performance characteristics of various storage workloads
• What are the pros and cons of different storage systems
• Choosing the appropriate storage backend for a certain workload/platform pair
• Monitoring and diagnosing issues related to storage performance in Xen deployments

OpenStack Quickstart with RDO on CentOS :: Haïkel Guemar

CentOS Linux 7 is a great platform for running OpenStack and in this two hour session we will introduce the basics of OpenStack and run through a demo of installing RDO (http://openstack.redhat.com) on CentOS Linux 7. The session will run in a tutorial format, so everyone with a laptop in the audience will be able to join and implement their own OpenStack in a VM. The focus will be on ensuring everyone has a basic setup, to include:

• Nova : The OpenStack Compute platform

• Glance : The OpenStack image delivery service

• Keystone : The OpenStack identity and authentication service

• Horizon : The OpenStack Web based management interface

We will finish the session with a 15 min speaker session on howto get involved with RDO development, packaging and testing and what the CentOS Cloud SIG is doing in this area.

In order to run the tutorial on your machine, we recommend a VM on your laptop that has 20GB+ of disk space, 2GB of ram and atleast 1 dedicated cpu core. If your laptop has the ability to run nested-virt, please enable that and use it. It will make a large difference to performance of the overall setup. We would also like to request everyone to setup these VMs ahead of time, in either KVM or Xen or any other virtualisation technology you might use. A basic CentOS-7 minimal install is sufficient to start from.

Slides

Ceph introduction and use cases :: Loic Dachary

Ceph (http://ceph.com/) is a free software storage platform designed to present object, block, and file storage from a single distributed computer cluster. Ceph's main goals are to be completely distributed without a single point of failure, scalable to the exabyte level, and freely-available. This one hour session will introduce the concepts of Ceph with a focus on the system administrator point of view.

Although Ceph has been designed to handle large clusters with a lot of data, it can be run from a laptop with the same functionalities. Participants are encouraged to have a laptop prepared with:

• git clone https://github.com/ceph/ceph.git

• cd ceph
• bash run-make-check.sh

That will allow them to run some use cases, from sources:

• the smallest possible cluster, in a directory and no redundancy
• a three disk cluster with two replicas
• self healing after the loss of one disk
• increasing durability and reducing disk usage with erasure code

GlusterFS quickstart tutorial :: Lalatendu Mohanty

GlusterFS is an open source, distributed file system capable of scaling to several petabytes and handling thousands of clients. It is a file system with a modular, stackable design, and a unique no-metadata server architecture. GlusterFS is designed for today's high-performance, virtualized cloud environments.

This tutorial session will introduce audience to GlusterFS and its deployment methods. Here are the high level points the session going to cover.

• Introduction to GlusterFS
• Introduction to CentOS Storage SIG
• Installing, creating and mounting a GlusterFS volume.
  • Setup part will cover few topics like add-brick, rebalance, replication and self-heal.
  • Access volume through Fuse, NFS
  • Using puppet-gluster+vagrant to deploy GlusterFS
• Talk about other useful gluster features (current and upcoming) (open stack integration, ovirt, geo-rep, erasure coding, nfs ganesha, etc) and give pointers for further exploration.

RPM Building 101 :: Brian Stinson

A short introduction and demo of building RPM packages using rpmbuild and mock.

We will cover:

• Short overview of the RPM format
• Setting up an rpmbuild environment
• Building packages with rpmbuild
• Building packages with Mock
• Where to look for further reading

Brian Stinson is a Systems Administrator for the Mathematics Department at Kansas State University. He also works with the CentOS CBS and Infra teams on build tools like Centpkg.

Video is now online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTTbu_q2xiQ Slides: rpm-building-101.pdf

Introduction to CentOS Atomic Host and Containers:: Joe Brockmeier

This is a quick overview of the CentOS Atomic SIG, the host, and available CentOS-based containers. We'll look at how to start using the CentOS Atomic Host, running containers using Docker, how to use rpm-ostree (atomic) to update hosts, the Cockpit administration tool, and even cover how to create your own custom Atomic tree.

We'll also cover, briefly, how to contribute to the Atomic SIG and/or how to submit Dockerfiles for use by the larger community.

To play along with the presentation, attendees should have Vagrant, VirtManager or another way to run CentOS Atomic Host during the Dojo.

Getting started with CentOS Atomic Host:: Vincent Batts

Vincent Batts will do a deeper dive into using CentOS Atomic Host, the basics of using Kubernetes with Docker containers, and some best practices for using Docker on CentOS.

Location

The CentOS Dojo, Brussels is going to be held at

IBM Client Center Brussels
Avenue du Bourget/ Bourgetlaan 42
B – 1130 Brussels

You can find more details about the venue at their microsite at http://www-05.ibm.com/be/clientcenter/contact.html

There will be WiFi available at the venue through the entire day. If you intend to attend the hackathon, please bring your own laptop suitably prepared on the day.