Following the recent pattern, the discussion about Red Hat’s move to no longer make the source code for RHEL publicly available continues. The most recent development was the Open Enterprise Linux Association announcing its founding by the initial members CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE. It is a place where these three organizations share what they consider the RHEL-compatible source code. For me, the big question is, why is AlmaLinux not there?
For LINBIT, and other vendors operating primarily in the RHEL eco-system, the question is, does this fragment “Enterprise Linux”? Will there be RHEL and Open Enterprise Linux? Will it increase the number of distributions we need to build for? Will it increase the number of platforms we have to support?
In other news, The Storage Newsletter featured a market report by Gigaoms Joep Piscaer that looks at LINBIT SDS for Kubernetes and puts it into relation with offerings from NetApp, Infinidat, IBM, HPE, Dell, and Pure Storage.
Regarding LINBIT, I’m happy to share a new YouTube video titled Introducing the LINBIT GUI. The video demonstrates how to configure and manage LINSTOR using the LINBIT SDS GUI, how the GUI compares to the CLI, and discusses how you can use both interfaces for LINSTOR cluster administration.
In my previous newsletter, I shared the ‘How to Setup LINSTOR on Proxmox VE’ video. Since then, the team has also released a technical blog post with the same title. We understand and appreciate that some people prefer video and others written content, and I’m happy that our team has found the time to deliver both.
The advantage of the written content is that we can share specific commands that our readers can copy to set things up themselves. Whatever your preference, I hope our content is valuable and enjoyable.
We’ve had a few notable software updates since I last wrote.
linstor-server 1.24.0 comes with the long-awaited database conversion tool. It lets you switch a LINSTOR controller between the different backend database technologies (H4, etcd, Kubernetes-CRDs, mySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL).
linstor-server 1.24.1 followed a few days later because one of our k8s/crd backend users hit a bug if he had too many objects in the rollback transaction. We fixed this issue with this release and another problem with etcd importing.
drbd-9.1.16 and drbd-9.2.5 is an update that contained no exceptional bug fixes. Most addressed bugs require very particular conditions to trigger and have simple workarounds. By now, we know we accidentally introduced a false-positive warning with this release. If you see ‘WARNING: CPU: XX PID: XXXX at /tmp/pkg/drbd-9.2.5/drbd/drbd_bitmap.c:1279 bm_rw_range.constprop.0+0x547/0x5c0 [drbd]’ followed by a stack trace in your logs, you can safely ignore it.
