Raphaël Hertzog

Spotify migrate 5000 servers from Debian to Ubuntu

July 16, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

Or yet another reason why it’s really important that we succeed with Debian LTS. Last year we heard of Dreamhost switching to Ubuntu because they can maintain a stable Ubuntu release for longer than a Debian stable release (and this despite the fact that Ubuntu only supports software in its main section, which misses a lot of popular software).

A few days ago, we just learned that Spotify took a similar decision:

A while back we decided to move onto Ubuntu for our backend server deployment. The main reasons for this was a predictable release cycle and long term support by upstream (this decision was made before the announcement that the Debian project commits to long term support as well.) With the release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we are now in the process of migrating our ~5000 servers to that distribution.

This is just a supplementary proof that we have to provide long term support for Debian releases if we want to stay relevant in big deployments.

But the task is daunting and it’s difficult to find volunteers to do the job. That’s why I believe that our best answer is to get companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS.

We managed to convince a handful of companies already and July is the first month where paid contributors have joined the effort for a modest participation of 21 work hours (watch out for Thorsten Alteholz and Holger Levsen on debian-lts and debian-lts-announce). But we need to multiply this figure by 5 or 6 at least to make a correct work of maintaining Debian 6.

So grab the subscription form and have a chat with your management. It’s time to convince your company to join the initiative. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions or if you prefer that I contact a representative of your company. Thank you!

My Free Software Activity in June 2014

July 4, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (168.17 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Debian LTS

After having put in place the infrastructure to allow companies to contribute financially to Debian LTS, I spent quite some time to draft the announce of the launch of Debian LTS (on a suggestion of Moritz Mühlenhoff who pointed out to me that there was no such announce yet).

I’m pretty happy about the result because we managed to mention a commercial offer without generating any pushback from the community. The offer is (in my necessarily biased opinion) clearly in the interest of Debian but still the money doesn’t go to Debian so we took extra precautions. When I got in touch with the press officers, I included the Debian leader in the discussion and his feedback has been very helpful to improve the announce. He also officially “acked” the press release to give some confidence to the press officers that they were doing the right thing.

Lucas also pushed me to seek public review of the draft press release, which I did. The discussion was constructive and the draft got further improved.

The news got widely relayed, but on the flip side, the part with the call for help got almost no attention from the press. Even Linux Weekly News skipped it!

On the Freexian side, we just crossed 10% of a full-time position (funded by 6 companies) and we are in contact with a few other companies in discussion. But we’re far from our goal yet so we will have to actively reach out to more companies. Do you know companies who are still running Debian 6 servers ? If yes, please send me the details (name + url + contact info if possible) to deblts@freexian.com so that I can get in touch and invite them to contribute to the project.

Distro Tracker

In the continuation of the Debian France game, I continued to work together with Joseph Herlant and Christophe Siraut on multiple improvements to distro tracker in order to prepare for its deployment on tracker.debian.org (which I just announced \o/).

Debian France

Since the Debian France game was over, I shipped the rewards. 5 books have been shipped to:

Joseph Herlant and Christophe Siraut for their distro-tracker work
Dylan Aissi for his help within the Debian Med team
Samuel Dorsaz and Thomas Debesse for their work towards better support of Brother printers

Misc Debian work

I orphaned sql-ledger and made a last upload to change the maintainer to Debian QA (with a new upstream version).

After having been annoyed a few times by dch breaking my name in the changelog, I filed #750855 which got quickly fixed.

I disabled a broken patch in quilt to fix RC bug #751109.

I filed #751771 when I discovered an incorrect dependency on ruby-uglifier (while doing packaging work for Kali Linux).

I tested newer versions of ruby-libv8 on armel/armhf on request of the upstream author. I had reported him those build failures (github ticket here).

Thanks

See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

Tracker.debian.org is live

July 4, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

Maybe do you remember, last year I mentored a Google Summer of code whose aim was to replace our well known Package Tracking System with something more modern, usable by derivatives and more easily hackable. The result of this project is a new Django-based software called Distro Tracker.

With the help of the Debian System Administrators, it’s now setup on tracker.debian.org!

This service is also managed by the Debian QA team, it’s deployed in /srv/tracker.debian.org/ (on ticharich.debian.org, a VM) if you want to verify something on the live installation. It runs under the “qa” user (so members of the “qa-core” group can administer it).

That said you can reproduce the setup on your workstation quite easily, just by checking out the git repository and applying this change:

--- a/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py
+++ b/distro_tracker/project/settings/local.py
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ overrides on top of those type-of-installation-specific settings.
 
 from .defaults import INSTALLED_APPS
 from .selected import *
+from .debian import *
 
 ## Add your custom settings here

Speaking of contributing, the documentation includes a “Contributing” section to get you up and running, ready to do your first contribution!

Now go use this new service and report any issue against the new tracker.debian.org pseudo-package (BTW tracker.debian.org knows about pseudo-packages, example here).

There are many small things that need to be fixed/improved, if you know Python/Django and would like to start contributing to Debian, here’s your chance! 🙂

Convince your company to contribute to Debian Long Term Support

June 19, 2014 by Raphaël Hertzog

The press picked up the recent press release about Debian LTS but mainly to mention the fact that it’s up and running. The call for help is almost never mentioned.

It’s a pity because while it’s up, it’s not really running satisfactorily yet. As of today (2014-06-19), 36 packages in squeeze need a security update, yet squeeze-lts has only seen 7 updates.

As usual what we lack is contributors doing the required work, but in this specific case, there’s a simple solution: pay people to do the required work. This extended support is mainly for the benefit of corporate users and if they see value in Debian LTS, it should not be too difficult to convince companies to support the project.

With some other Debian developers, we have gone out of our way to make it super easy for companies to support the Debian LTS project. We have created a service offer for Debian-using companies.

Freexian (my company) collects money from all contributing companies (by way of invoices) and then uses the money collected to pay Debian contributors who will prepare security updates. On top of this we added some concrete benefits for contributing companies such as the possibility to indicate which packages should have priority, or even the possibility to provide functional tests to ensure that a security update doesn’t introduce a regression in their production setup.

To make a good job of maintaining Debian Squeeze, our goal is to fund the equivalent of a full-time position. We’re currently far from there with only 13 hours per month funded by 4 companies. That makes a current average of 3.25 hours/month funded by each contributing company, for a price of 276 EUR/month or 3315 EUR/year.

This is not much if you compare it with the price those companies would have to pay to upgrade all their Debian 6 machines now instead of keeping them for two supplementary years.

Assuming the average contribution level will stay the same, we only need the support of 50 other companies in the world. That’s really not much compared to the thousands of companies using Debian. Can you convince your own company? Grab the subscription form and have a chat with your company management.

Help us reach that goal, share this article and the link to Freexian’s Debian LTS offer. Long Term Support is important if we want Debian to be a good choice for servers and big deployments. We need to make Squeeze LTS a success!

Thank you!

Debian LTS

Distro Tracker

Debian France

Misc Debian work

Thanks

Tags

Recent Posts