Fedora BTRFS+Snapper - The Fedora 29 Edition

History It’s 2019 and I’m just getting around to converting my desktop system to Fedora 29. For my work laptop I’ve moved on to Fedora Silverblue (previously known as Atomic Workstation) and will probably move my desktop there soon too as I’ve had a good experience so far. For now I’ll stick my desktop system to this old setup with BTRFS+snapper where I am able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS snapshots, and a tool called snapper. [Read More]

Easy PXE boot testing with only HTTP using iPXE and libvirt

Update: A future post explains how to do this even easier without PXELINUX. Introduction Occasionally I have a need to test out a PXE install workflow. All of this is super easy if you have a permanent PXE infrastructure you maintain which traditionally has consisted of DHCP, TFTP and HTTP/FTP servers. What if I just have my laptop and want to test something in a VM? It turns out it’s pretty easy to do using libvirt and a simple http server. [Read More]

Fedora 28->29 Atomic Host Upgrade Guide

cross posted with this Project Atomic blog post Introduction This week we put out the first release of Fedora 29 Atomic Host. This will be the last major release of Fedora Atomic Host as we prepare for Fedora CoreOS which will be released in Fedora 30. In this post we’ll quickly list some known issues and then talk about updating an existing Fedora 28 Atomic Host system to Fedora 29. We’ll cover preparing the system for upgrade and performing the upgrade. [Read More]

RPM-OSTree Bisecting Helps Track Down Boot Timeout Issue

Introduction Last time I talked about using rpm-ostree-bisect, a tool that I wrote to automatically bisect the history of an OSTree remote in order to find the exact commit when a problem was introduced. I recently put the tool to the test again. The Problem Recently a user reported an issue where their system was seeing timeouts on boot. They determined that if they removed the resume=/dev/mapper/fedora-swap argument from the kernel command line then the system would boot without timing out on the swap device (i. [Read More]

Automated Bisect Testing Of An Entire OS with RPM-OSTree

Introduction Occasionally in OS land we’ll come across a bug that snuck its way into a build and has been in the wild for a while before anyone notices it. One example is a recent bug (originally discovered by the community of CoreOS Container Linux) where the jumbo packet MTU size of 9001 was no longer getting set properly on EC2 instances. So we have this bug, and we know things used to work. [Read More]

Pinning Deployments in OSTree Based Systems

cross posted with this Project Atomic blog post Introduction RPM-OSTree/OSTree conveniently allows you to rollback if you upgrade and don’t like the upgraded software. This is done by keeping around the old deployment; the old software you booted in to. After a single upgrade you’ll have a booted deployement and the rollback deployment. On the next upgrade the current rollback deployment will be discarded and the current booted deployment will become the new rollback deployment. [Read More]

April Fedora Infrastructure Hackfest

Introduction Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend the 2018 Fedora Infrastructure Hackfest. It’s always a treat to hang out with some of the people who really make Fedora tick. Sinny Kumari and I were there to help represent the Atomic Working Group, and also get some face time with each other to learn and hack on a few things related to the Atomic Working group. The Hackfest was held in Paul Frield’s hometown of Fredricksburg, VA. [Read More]

Pruning Policy for Specific Branches of OSTree Repos

Introduction In Fedora we are moving to a unified OSTree repo structure where there is a single OSTree repository that is the remote for all branches of Fedora (rawhide, branched, stable, etc). As part of this we want to be able to define different retention policies for different branches within the repository. For rawhide we’ll retain a few weeks worth of commits, but for stable we don’t want to prune any of the commits. [Read More]

Firewalld in Atomic Host

cross posted with this Project Atomic blog post TL;DR Fedora Atomic Host (and derivatives) will now include the firewalld package in the base OSTree that is tested, delivered, and released every two weeks. Existing users should observe no change as it won’t be enabled by default. Firewalld in Atomic Host In the past we have had requests to have firewalld in Atomic Host to enable a better interface into firewall management for administrators and management software. [Read More]

Fedora BTRFS+Snapper - The Fedora 27 Edition

History I’m back again with the Fedora 27 edition of my Fedora BTRFS+Snapper series. As you know, in the past I have configured my computers to be able to snapshot and rollback the entire system by leveraging BTRFS snapshots, a tool called snapper, and a patched version of Fedora’s grub2 package. I have some great news this time! You no longer need a patched version of Fedora’s grub package in order to pull this off. [Read More]