Tag: announcements

Atlassian Stride

Stride is a new product from Atlassian.  It is a re-branded and, hopefully, improved HipChat.  I haven’t tried it yet, but our team account will be upgraded soon enough.

To be honest, I’m not that excited about this move, but I’ll give it a benefit of a doubt.  I know there was a lot of hype about Slack recently, but I was really happy with HipChat.   I tried Slack for three days, and ran away.  But HipChat I can’t leave without.  It’s a much simpler and cleaner user interface, and it just works – completely out of your way.

Judging by the screenshots, Stride is a user interface upgrade to HipChat.  Atlassian has been moving to the new design recently with BitBucket and possibly other tools, so this part makes sense from at least their perspective.  Stride also brings free video calls, voice calls, and screen sharing.  HipChat had this option for the premium accounts (2$/month/user).  We tried it for a month and reverted, as the quality of calls and video was horrible.  And there were constant crashes and disconnections. Hopefully, Atlassian has put some work into these issues for the Stride release.

The most annoying thing about the upgrade from HipChat to Stride will be all the integrations.  Atlassian is promising to migrate all the data – history, files, custom smileys, etc.  But the best part about HipChat are the integrations.  We have a whole lot of them – GitHub, BitBucket, TravisCI, Twitter, WordPress,  Zabbix, and even our own custom ones, that we use for project deployments.  All these will have to be reconfigured and setup for Stride separately.  That’ll take a few hours here and there to get things back to where they were.

As far as the new features go, I don’t see too much yet.  Apart from the already mentioned voice calls, video calls, and screen sharing, there are just a couple.  Focus Mode is not really a big feature.  HipChat, much like any other messaging application, already had the status (Online, Away, Do Not Disturb, etc).  So Focus Mode is pretty much the same thing, with an extra time setting, so that you don’t forget to change you status back after a couple of hours.

Actions and Decisions is a nice addition.  You’ll be able to mark any message as an action or decision so that its easier to find and follow up on later.  But for us that’s not going to do much as we are already using Redmine for the project management.  Actions go into Redmine as tickets, and can later be referenced in commit messages, linked to each other, etc.  Having actions in Stride will probably work for very small teams with very few projects.  For us, we have a separate room for every project, every team, every office, and then some.  So searching for actions in a hundred-something rooms is far from perfect.  But maybe Stride’s search will be more powerful than that one of HipChat.  We’ll see.

Oh, and I’m guessing all the users will have to downloading and install new apps – for mobile, desktop, etc.  That’s yet another thing to do.

As I said, I haven’t tried Stride yet, and I hope it’ll be a huge improvement over HipChat, even though I HipChat worked great for me.  As I see it now, I think re-branding and the new design could have happened on the HipChat infrastructure.  Moving people to the new application altogether has to be justified by some major improvements.  And I’m not seeing anything major just yet.

CentOS 7.3 released

CentOS 7.3 was released rather quietly a couple of days ago.  Or maybe it wasn’t quietly, but I still somehow missed it.  Here is a list of major changes:

  • Since release 1503 (abrt>= 2.1.11-19.el7.centos.0.1) CentOS-7 can report bugs directly to bugs.centos.org.
  • Various new packages include among others: python-gssapi, python-netifaces, mod_auth_openidc, pidgin and Qt5.
  • Support for the 7th-generation Core i3, i5, and i7 Intel processors and I2C on 6th-generation Core Processors has been added.
  • Various packages have been rebased. Some of those are samba, squid, systemd, krb5, gcc-libraries, binutils, gfs-utils, libreoffice, GIMP,SELinux, firewalld, libreswan, tomcat and open-vm-tools.
  • SHA2 is now supported by OpenLDAP.
  • ECC-support has been added to OPenJDK-8, PerlNet:SSLeay and PerlIO::Socket::SSL.
  • Bluetooth LE is now supported.
  • virt-p2v is now fully supported. virt-v2v and virt-p2v add support for the latest windows releases.
  • Lots of updated storage, network and graphics drivers.
  • Technology Preview: Among others support of Btrfs, OverlayFS, CephFS, DNSSEC, kpatch, the Cisco VIC and usNIC kernel driver, nested virtualization with KVM and multi-threaded xz compression with rpm-builds.

More information is here.

Also, make sure you read the Known Issues section, as it might surprise you:

  • SElinux received major changes in this release, which might break certain functionality on your system. You might want to take a look at this bugzilla entry for further information.
  • The initramfs files are now significantly bigger than in CentOS-7 (1503). You may want to consider lowering installonly_limit in /etc/yum.conf to reduce the number of installed kernels if your /boot partition is smaller than 400MB. New installations should consider using 1GB as the size of the /boot partition.
  • The newer version of openssh in this release does not exit on the first match in the .ssh/config file as the older version did. This means if you have multiple host sections that match in your config for a given host, ALL will be applied. As an example, if you have a “host1.example.com” entry and a “*.example.com” entry, it will apply BOTH sets of instructions to “host1.example.com” but only the “*.example.com” section for “host2.example.com”.
  • Many people have complained that Ethernet interfaces are not started with the new default NetworkManager tool/have to be explicitly enabled during installation. See CentOS-7 FAQ#2.
  • At least 1024 MB RAM is required to install and use CentOS-7 (1611). When using the Live ISOs for install, 1024 MB RAM produces very slow results and even some install failures. At least 1344 MB RAM is recommend for LiveGNOME or LiveKDE installs.
  • If your screen resolution is 800×600 or lower, parts of the images shown at the bottom during install are clipped.
  • VMware Workstation/VMware ESXi allow to install two different virtual SCSI adapters: BusLogic and LsiLogic. However the default kernel from CentOS-7 does not include the corresponding driver for any of them thus resulting in an unbootable system if you install on a SCSI disk using the defaults for CentOS Linux. If you select ‘Red Hat Enterprise Linux’ as OS, the paravirtualized SCSI adapter is used, which works.
  • Commonly used utilities such as ifconfig/netstat have been marked as deprecated for some considerable time and the ‘net-tools’ package is no longer part of the @core group so will not be installed by default. Use nmcli c up ifname <interfacename> to get your network up and running and use yum to install the package if you really need it. Kickstart users can pull in the net-tools package as part of the install.
  • The AlpsPS/2 ‘ALPS DualPoint TouchPad’ edge scrolling does not work by default on CentOS-7. See bug 7403 for the command to make this feature work.
    After the update, some NICs may change their name from something like enoxxxxxxxx to something like ensxxx. This is due to the updated systemd package.
  • The 4 STIG Security Profiles in the anaconda installer produce a broken sshd_config that must be edited before sshd will start (BZ 1401069)

Amazon Snowmobile – a truck with up to 100 Petabytes of storage

Back in my college days, I had a professor who frequently used Andrew Tanenbaum‘s quote in the networking class:

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

I guess he wasn’t the only one, as during this year’s Amazon re:Invent 2016 conference, the company announced, among other things, a AWS Snowmobile:

Moving large amounts of on-premises data to the cloud as part of a migration effort is still more challenging than it should be! Even with high-end connections, moving petabytes or exabytes of film vaults, financial records, satellite imagery, or scientific data across the Internet can take years or decades. On the business side, adding new networking or better connectivity to data centers that are scheduled to be decommissioned after a migration is expensive and hard to justify.

[…]

In order to meet the needs of these customers, we are launching Snowmobile today. This secure data truck stores up to 100 PB of data and can help you to move exabytes to AWS in a matter of weeks (you can get more than one if necessary). Designed to meet the needs of our customers in the financial services, media & entertainment, scientific, and other industries, Snowmobile attaches to your network and appears as a local, NFS-mounted volume. You can use your existing backup and archiving tools to fill it up with data destined for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or Amazon Glacier.

Thanks to this VentureBeat page, we even have a picture of the monster:

aws-snowmobile

100 Petabytes on wheels!

I know, I know, it looks like a regular truck with a shipping container on it.  But I’m pretty sure it’s VERY different from the inside.  With all that storage, networking, power, and cooling needed, it would be awesome to take a pick into this thing.

 

 

Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09

amazon ami 2016.09

AWS Blog lets us know that Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 is now available.  It comes with a variety of updates, such as Nginx 1.10, PHP 7, and PostgreSQL 9.5 and Python 3.5.  Another thing that got quite a bit of improvement is the boot time of the Amazon Linux AMI instances.  Here’s a comparison chart:

amazon-linux-ami-launch-time-2016-09-whiteboard

Read about all the changes in the release notes.

P.S.: I’m still stuck with Amazon AMI on a few of my instances, but in general I have to remind all of you to NOT use the Amazon AMI.  You’ve been warned.

Vim 8.0 Released!

The team behind the greatest text editor of all times has release the new major version – Vim 8.0.  It’s the first major release in 10 years!  Brief overview of the changes:

  • Asynchronous I/O support, channels, JSON
  • Jobs
  • Timers
  • Partials, Lambdas and Closures
  • Packages
  • New style testing
  • Viminfo merged by timestamp
  • GTK+ 3 support
  • MS-Windows DirectX support

For a more complete list and details, have a look here.

The TL;DR summary: Vim provides a lot more power now to plugin developers, so we’ll be seeing a boost in both new functionality and old ways getting better.

Here is a mandatory Slashdot discussion with your usual Vim vs. Emacs flame.

P.S.: Emacs has recently released a major update too …