Category Archives: Conferences

Edubuntu: The path to 14.04 LTS

Posted on 2012/10/21 by Stéphane Graber

(tl;dr: Edubuntu 14.04 will include a new Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu tablet edition with a lot of cool new features including a full feature Active Directory compatible domain.)

Now that Edubuntu 12.10 is out the door and the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Copenhagen is just a week away, I thought it’d be an appropriate time to share our vision for Edubuntu 14.04.

This was so far only discussed in person with Jonathan Carter and a bit on IRC with other Edubuntu developers but I think it’s time to make our plans a bit more visible so we can get more feedback and hopefully get interested people together next week at UDS.

There are three big topics I’d like to talk about. Edubuntu desktop, Edubuntu server and Edubuntu tablet.

Edubuntu desktop

Edubuntu desktop is what we’ve been offering since the first Edubuntu release and what we’ll obviously continue to offer pretty much as it’s today.
It’s not an area I plan on spending much time working on personally but I expect Jonathan to drive most of the work around this.

Basically what the Edubuntu desktop needs nowadays is a better application selection, better testing, better documentation, making sure our application selection works on all our supported platforms and is properly translated.

We’ll also have to refocus some of our efforts and will likely drop some things like our KDE desktop package that hasn’t been updated in years and was essentially doubling our maintenance work which is why we stopped supporting it officially in 12.04.

There are a lot of cool new tools we’ve heard of recently and that really should be packaged and integrated in Edubuntu.

Edubuntu Server

Edubuntu Server will be a new addition to the Edubuntu project, expected to ship in its final form in 14.04 and will be supported for 5 years as part of the LTS.

This is the area I’ll be spending most of my Edubuntu time on as it’s going to be using a lot of technologies I’ve been involved with over the years to offer what I hope will be an amazing server experience.

Edubuntu Server will essentially let you manage a network of Edubuntu, Ubuntu or Windows clients by creating a full featured domain (using samba4).

From the same install DVD as Edubuntu Desktop, you’ll be able to simply choose to install a new Edubuntu Server and create a new domain, or if you already have an Edubuntu domain or even an Active Directory domain, you’ll be able to join an extra server to add extra scalibility or high-availability.

On top of that core domain feature, you’ll be able to add extra roles to your Edubuntu Server, the initial list is:

  • Web hosting platform – Will let you deploy new web services using JuJu so schools in your district or individual teachers can easily get their own website.
  • File server – A standard samba3 file server so all your domain members can easily store and retrieve files.
  • Backup server – Will automatically backup the important data from your servers and if you wish, from your clients too.
  • Schooltool – A school management web service, taking care of all the day to day school administration.

LTSP will also be part of that system as part of Edubuntu Terminal Server which will let you, still from our single install media, install as many new terminal servers as you want, automatically joining the domain, using the centralized authentication, file storage and backup capabilities of your Edubuntu Server.

As I mentioned, the Edubuntu DVD will let you install Edubuntu Desktop, Edubuntu Server and Edubuntu Terminal Server. You’ll simply be asked at installation time whether you want to join an Edubuntu Server or Active Directory domain or if you want your machine to be standalone.

Once installed, Edubuntu Server will be managed through a web interface driving LXC behind the scene to deploy new services, upgrade individual services or deploy new web services using JuJu.
Our goal is to have Edubuntu Server offer an appliance-like experience, never requiring any command line access to the system and easily supporting upgrades from a version to another.

For those wondering what the installation process will look like, I have some notes of the changes available at: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1289041/
I’m expecting to have the installer changes implemented by the time we start building our first 13.04 images.

The rest of Edubuntu Server will be progressively landing during the 13.04 cycle with an early version of the system being released with Edubuntu 13.04, possibly with only a limited selection of roles and without initial support for multiple servers and Active Directory integration.

While initially Edubuntu branded, our hope is that this work will be re-usable by Ubuntu and may one day find its way into Ubuntu Server.
Doing this as part of Edubuntu will give us more time and more flexibility to get it right, build a community around it and get user feedback before we try to get the rest of the world to use it too.

Edubuntu Tablet

During the Edubuntu 12.10 development cycle, the Edubuntu Council approved the sponsorship of 5 tablets by Revolution Linux which were distributed to some of our developers.

We’ve been doing daily armhf builds of Edubuntu, refined our package selections to properly work on ARM and spent countless hours fighting to get our tablet to boot (a ZaTab from ZaReason).
Even though it’s been quite a painful experience so far, we’re still planning on offering a supported armhf tablet image for 14.04, running something very close to our standard Edubuntu Desktop and also featuring integration with Edubuntu Server.

With all the recent news about Ubuntu on the Nexus 7, we’ll certainly be re-discussing what our main supported platform will be during next week’s UDS but we’re certainly planning on releasing 13.04 with experimental tablet support.

LTS vs non-LTS

For those who read our release announcement or visited our website lately, you certainly noticed the emphasis on using the LTS releases.
We really think that most Edubuntu users want something that’s stable, very well tested with regular updates and a long support time, so we’re now always recommending the use of the latest LTS release.

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing non-LTS release like the Mythbuntu folks recently decided to do, pretty far from that. What it means however is that we’ll more freely experiment in non-LTS releases so we can easily iterate through our ideas and make sure we release something well polished and rock solid for our LTS releases.

Conclusion

I’m really really looking forward to Edubuntu 14.04. I think the changes we’re planning will help our users a lot and will make it easier than ever to get school districts and individual schools to switch to Edubuntu for both their backend infrastructure with Edubuntu Server and their clients with Edubuntu Desktop and Edubuntu Tablet.

Now all we need is your ideas and if you have some, your time to make it all happen. We usually hang out in on freenode and can also be contacted on the edubuntu-devel mailing-list.

For those of you going to UDS, we’ll try to get an informational session on Edubuntu Server scheduled on top of our usual Edubuntu session. If you’re there and want to know more or want to help, please feel free to grab Jonathan or I in the hallway, at the bar or at one of the evening activities.

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, Edubuntu, LTSP, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | 10 Comments

LXC in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Posted on 2012/05/04 by Stéphane Graber

Quite a few people have been asking for a status update of LXC in Ubuntu as of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This post is meant as an overview of the work we did over the past 6 months and pointers to more detailed blog posts for some of the new features.

What’s LXC?

LXC is a userspace tool controlling the kernel namespaces and cgroup features to create system or application containers.

To give you an idea:

  • Feels like somewhere between a chroot and a VM
  • Can run a full distro using the “host” kernel
  • Processes running in a container are visible from the outside
  • Doesn’t require any specific hardware, works on all supported architectures

A libvirt driver for LXC exists (libvirt-lxc), however it doesn’t use the “lxc” userspace tool even though it uses the same kernel features.

Making LXC easier

One of the main focus for 12.04 LTS was to make LXC dead easy to use, to achieve this, we’ve been working on a few different fronts fixing known bugs and improving LXC’s default configuration.

Creating a basic container and starting it on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is now down to:

sudo apt-get install lxc
sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n my-container
sudo lxc-start -n my-container

This will default to using the same version and architecture as your machine, additional option are obviously available (–help will list them). Login/Password are ubuntu/ubuntu.

Another thing we worked on to make LXC easier to work with is reducing the number of hacks required to turn a regular system into a container down to zero.
Starting with 12.04, we don’t do any modification to a standard Ubuntu system to get it running in a container.
It’s now even possible to take a raw VM image and have it boot in a container!

The ubuntu-cloud template also lets you get one of our EC2/cloud images and have it start as a container instead of a cloud instance:

sudo apt-get install lxc cloud-utils
sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu-cloud -n my-cloud-container
sudo lxc-start -n my-cloud-container

And finally, if you want to test the new cool stuff, you can also use juju with LXC:

[ ! -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ] && ssh-keygen -t rsa
sudo apt-get install juju apt-cacher-ng zookeeper lxc libvirt-bin --no-install-recommends
sudo adduser $USER libvirtd
juju bootstrap
sed -i "s/ec2/local/" ~/.juju/environments.yaml
echo " data-dir: /tmp/juju" >> ~/.juju/environments.yaml
juju bootstrap
juju deploy mysql
juju deploy wordpress
juju add-relation wordpress mysql
juju expose wordpress

# To tail the logs
juju debug-log

# To get the IPs and status
juju status

Making LXC safer

Another main focus for LXC in Ubuntu 12.04 was to make it safe. John Johansen did an amazing work of extending apparmor to let us implement per-container apparmor profiles and prevent most known dangerous behaviours from happening in a container.

NOTE: Until we have user namespaces implemented in the kernel and used by the LXC we will NOT say that LXC is root safe, however the default apparmor profile as shipped in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is blocking any armful action that we are aware of.

This mostly means that write access to /proc and /sys are heavily restricted, mounting filesystems is also restricted, only allowing known-safe filesystems to be mounted by default. Capabilities are also restricted in the default LXC profile to prevent a container from loading kernel modules or control apparmor.

More details on this are available here:

Other cool new stuff

Emulated architecture containers

It’s now possible to use qemu-user-static with LXC to run containers of non-native architectures, for example:

sudo apt-get install lxc qemu-user-static
sudo lxc-create -n my-armhf-container -t ubuntu -- -a armhf
sudo lxc-start -n my-armhf-container

Ephemeral containers

Quite a bit of work also went into lxc-start-ephemeral, the tool letting you start a copy of an existing container using an overlay filesystem, discarding any change you make on shutdown:

sudo apt-get install lxc
sudo lxc-create -n my-container -t ubuntu
sudo lxc-start-ephemeral -o my-container

Container nesting

You can now start a container inside a container!
For that to work, you first need to create a new apparmor profile as the default one doesn’t allow this for security reason.
I already did that for you, so the few commands below will download it and install it in /etc/apparmor.d/lxc/lxc-with-nesting. This profile (or something close to it) will ship in Ubuntu 12.10 as an example of alternate apparmor profile for container.

sudo apt-get install lxc
sudo lxc-create -t ubuntu -n my-host-container
sudo wget https://www.stgraber.org/download/lxc-with-nesting -O /etc/apparmor.d/lxc/lxc-with-nesting
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor reload
sudo sed -i "s/#lxc.aa_profile = unconfined/lxc.aa_profile = lxc-container-with-nesting/" /var/lib/lxc/my-host-container/config
sudo lxc-start -n my-host-container
(in my-host-container) sudo apt-get install lxc
(in my-host-container) sudo stop lxc
(in my-host-container) sudo sed -i "s/10.0.3/10.0.4/g" /etc/default/lxc
(in my-host-container) sudo start lxc
(in my-host-container) sudo lxc-create -n my-sub-container -t ubuntu
(in my-host-container) sudo lxc-start -n my-sub-container

Documentation

Outside of the existing manpages and blog posts I mentioned throughout this post, Serge Hallyn did a very good job at creating a whole section dedicated to LXC in the Ubuntu Server Guide.
You can read it here: https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/lxc.html

Next steps

Next week we have the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA. There we’ll be working on the plans for LXC in Ubuntu 12.10. We currently have two sessions scheduled:

If you want to make sure the changes you want will be in Ubuntu 12.10, please make sure to join these two sessions. It’s possible to participate remotely to the Ubuntu Developer Summit, through IRC and audio streaming.

My personal hope for LXC in Ubuntu 12.10 is to have a clean liblxc library that can be used to create bindings and be used in languages like python. Working towards that goal should make it easier to do automated testing of LXC and cleanup our current tools.

I hope this post made you want to try LXC or for existing users, made you discover some of the new features that appeared in Ubuntu 12.04. We’re actively working on improving LXC both upstream and in Ubuntu, so do not hesitate to report bugs (preferably with “ubuntu-bug lxc”).

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 64 Comments

Arkose 1.3.1 released

Posted on 2011/08/18 by Stéphane Graber

Last week I was in Austin, TX where a bunch of people with interest in getting containers working on Linux were meeting for the Oneiric Container Sprint.
We all had a very productive week with a lot of work being done on LXC, the kernel namespaces and Arkose.

Right before the Ubuntu Feature Freeze last Thursday, I released Arkose 1.3 brining most of the features I wanted for Ubuntu 11.10.

Here’s a brief list of the new stuff Arkose can do:

  • All the UIs and CLIs now support translation with an initial (rough) french translation already available.
  • DBUS filtering is now included in Arkose and available through the wrapper. The gedit example profile is using it.
  • It’s now possible to temporarily modify a wrapper profile before starting it.
  • Device support has been changed to no longer be limited to /dev/video* devices.

Some bugs have also been fixed, most of them in Arkose 1.3.1 (released yesterday):

  • Make the Global Menu integration (dbusmenu) work with Ubuntu Oneiric
  • Update the test suite
  • Fix arkose-cli’s help to be a lot more accurate
  • Restrict LXC’s configuration to the bare minimal
  • Use point-to-point network configuration in filtered mode (rather than a /30 per container)
  • Make sure everything in the container gets properly killed on exit
  • Fix Arkose to handle command line parameters properly (instead of just ignoring them)

That’s all available in current Ubuntu Oneiric as well as in the arkose stable PPA for Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

Sadly one feature didn’t make it in time for Feature Freeze, that’s the advanced firewalling in filtered network mode. I’ll probably be working on it on the side and push it to a 1.4 branch that’ll be used for Oneiric+1.

I’ll now mostly be focusing on bugfixes for the remaining of the cycle and polishing some of the existing features. So please, test it and file bugs!

If you want to help with the translation effort, you can go translate Arkose on Launchpad or just send me a .po and I’ll do it for you.

For these who want to run the current upstream code, get the bzr branch:
bzr branch lp:arkose

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment

State of IPv6 in Ubuntu Oneiric

Posted on 2011/07/26 by Stéphane Graber

One of my focus for the Oneiric development cycle is to make sure we get proper support of IPv6 both at install time and during regular use of the system.

To achieve this, I started working on the list of all possible scenarios I could think of with all possible combinations of IPv4 and IPv6. Then checked how well these were supported on Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu 11.04, we now have a DHCPv6 aware DHCP client but that’s not working as well as it should because Network Manager didn’t do IPv6 by default back then and because the DHCP client configuration for IPv6 wasn’t too clear (dhclient wasn’t requesting any attribute).

Most of these issues are now fixed in Oneiric with Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre‘s great work on updating Network Manager in Oneiric to have IPv6 on by default and make sure people don’t have to wait for IPv6 to timeout to get their IPv4 connectivity.

The result is something like you can see below, on a network that has both DHCPv4 and stateless DHCPv6:

The use cases that are currently tested are:

  • Single stack: SLAAC IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: Stateful DHCPv6 IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: Stateless DHCPv6 IPv6-only network
  • Single stack: DHCPv4 IPv4-only network
  • Dual stack: SLAAC + DHCPv4 network
  • Dual stack: Stateful DHCPv6 + DHCPv4 network
  • Dual stack: Stateless DHCPv6 + DHCPv4 network

For these interested, you can look at the following files to get some example DHCPv4, DHCPv6 and RADVD configuration:

It’s worth noting that you have to start a separate dhcpd server for IPv6 (with the -6 flag) as dhcpd can’t answer both dhcpv4 and dhcpv6 at the same time. You need two separate daemons with two separate configuration files.

As you can see from the files above, I have a pretty complete IPv6 test setup, running on libvirt. I’m now working on automating all of this so we can get some easy regression testing of IPv6 support on Ubuntu.

During our sprint last month in Dublin, Colin Watson also got netcfg to support IPv6 thereby making debian-installer working with IPv6. The missing piece now is ifupdown support of DHCPv6 (so you can configure DHCPv6 in /etc/network/interfaces) and we should then have Ubuntu install on IPv6 from the alternate/server disks.

IPv6 support is starting to look really good for Oneiric and should be awesome for the next LTS.
If you’re already running Oneiric on an IPv6 capable network, please test the new Network Manager and if you encounter any problem, please file bugs or poke me so I can add some more tests to my list!

Posted in Canonical voices, Conferences, IPv6, Planet Ubuntu | 20 Comments

Busy week for Arkose

Posted on 2011/07/05 by Stéphane Graber

So last week I was in Dublin with my colleagues hacking on Oneiric. Most of the week has been spent either testing/fixing Ubuntu’s IPv6 support (more about that soon) or working on Arkose.

On Monday I released version 1.1 that was mostly bugfixes and introduced a new profile for Skype. Then after that I started working on the interesting stuff to end up releasing 1.2.1 on Thursday evening.

The new features are:

  • Filtered network support (one interface per container, routed/firewalled)
  • Video devices passthrough  (useful for Skype)
  • Support bind mount of files (thanks to Colin Watson)
  • Reworked UI for the wrapper

A lot of bugfixes also went in during the week. Now when Arkose crashes or raises an exception, it should deal with it properly, unmount everything and exit rather than leaving you with a lot of entries in your mount table.

The new Skype profile now lets you start Skype in an environment where it’ll only be able to see its configuration file, run on a separate isolated X server, access pulseaudio on a separate socket and only access the few video devices Arkose detected.

During the week I also spent some time talking to the Ubuntu Security team who also happen to be upstreams for Apparmor. In the future Arkose should start using Apparmor in cases where we don’t need an actual LXC container (depending on the profiles).

I also started working on a protocol-aware DBUS proxy based on the work from Alban Crequy so that Arkose should soon be able to filter what DBUS calls an app is allowed to do and prompt the user when accessing restricted information (keyring, contacts, …).
I’m hoping to have this merged into Arkose’s trunk branch this week.

After that I plan on spending some time implementing the network restrictions on top of the new “filtered network” support I introduced last week. Initially that should cover restricting an app to non-private (rfc1918) networks and eventually support fine grained filtering (destination and port).

Version 1.2.1 is available as tarballs on Launchpad or from the bzr branch or in current Ubuntu Oneiric. PPA builds are also available for Maverick and Natty.

Posted in Arkose, Canonical voices, Conferences, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment