today's howtos

• Consuming logs from a Kafka topic using syslog-ng

  There is no official Kafka source in syslog-ng, but because this question comes up often enough, I created one. It is just a temporary workaround using the program() source, but it works. It involves Java and installing Kafka manually, but it was fast and reliabe in my tests: ingesting 50,000–100,000 messages a second on my laptop in a resource-constrained virtual machine. Of course, I also tried a more resource-friendly solution, using kafkacat to consume log messages from a Kafka topic. While it worked perfectly on the command line, I could not get it to work with the program() source in syslog-ng. If you read my blog last week about using templates in the topic() parameter of the Kafka destination, the test environment will look familiar. The only notable difference is that the tool used to consume logs from Kafka is now called within syslog-ng from a program() source.

• Simple Linux Backups with Rsync command - LinuxTechLab

  Having a comprehensive data protection policy in place is now a fundamental practice to help ensure your data manages to weather all the storms that can be thrown at it. Saying that it should be done is the easy part, actually doing it gets more complex, and laborious, depending on the policy in place and what standards and laws the organization needs to adhere to. Fortunately, for Linux users there a tool exists that makes backing up data a breeze, and it can all be done from the command line.

• Set up a Linux cloud on bare metal | Opensource.com

  Virtualization is one of the most used technologies. Fedora Linux uses Cloud Base images to create general-purpose virtual machines (VM), but there are many ways to set up Cloud Base images. Recently, the virt-install command-line tool for provisioning VMs added support for cloud-init, so it can now be used to configure and run a cloud image locally.

• Quick and dirty ipmitool tutorial

• Environment Modules - Michael Jansen, Drive By Coding

  Environment Modules is one of those open source projects that I wish more people would know and use. I always wonder why tools like asdf don’t provide support for it instead of rolling their own implementation. So lets increase awareness.

• Easy frugal installation [Ed: updated]

  EasyOS is downloaded as an image file for a USB-stick, that you can boot on your PC. This will get you up and running with EasyOS, however, you might then want to install Easy to the hard drive in the computer. That is what this page is about.

SUSE/OpenSUSE Leftovers

• OAK compatibility with all openSUSE

  While fcused on the openSUSE Innovator initiative as an openSUSE member and official Intel oneAPI innovator, I tested the OAK AI Kit device on openSUSE Leap 15.1, 15.2 and Tumbleweed. With all the work, we made available in the SDB an article on how to install this device on the openSUSE platform. More information can be found at https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Install_OAK_AI_Kit. The OpenCV AI Kit, that is, OAK, is a tiny, low-end hardware computing module based on the integrated Intel Movidius Myriad-X AI chip. In comparison to other GPU, CPU, FPGA or TPU-based AI acceleration solutions, Movidius is a VPU architecture with 4.0 TOPS computing capacity. And it is 80 times faster for CV and AI tasks than the well-known OpenMV project, which has only 0.05 TOPS based on the ARM Cortex M7 microcontroller.

• SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher ushers in an innovative new brand

  In 2020 SUSE and Rancher joined forces with one shared vision: being known as the leading open source innovator in the world. Entrusted with the challenge of fusing two strong brands, the brand refresh needed to capture the heart and soul of both companies while aligning them to one strong, shared identity.

• Content Management with SUSE Manager 4.1

  The concept of Content Lifecycle Management is not new and applies to any piece of digital content, following it from beginning, to middle, to end of creation. With SUSE® Manager, this idea is applied to software intended for rollout to production systems. Content Lifecycle Management allows you to customize and test packages before updating production systems. This is especially useful if you need to apply updates during a limited maintenance window. From within SUSE® Manager, you can select software channels as sources, adjust them as required for your environment, and thoroughly test them before installing onto your production systems. From beginning (original development), to middle (testing), to end (deployment).

Red Hat/Fedora Leftovers

• Fedora 34 Cleared For Btrfs Zstd Compression By Default, DNF/RPM Copy-On-Write - Phoronix

  The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has unanimously approved several high profile features for the upcoming Fedora 34. The latest batch of Fedora 34 features that received unanimous approval ahead of tomorrow's scheduled FESCo meeting include: - Deprecating XEMacs and related packages. This is due to XEmacs not seeing a major release in over seven years and the upstream development essentially at an end. There is still an occasional commit but no meaningful additions being made and thus XEMacs is being deprecated.

• 5 tips for configuring virtualenvs with Ansible Tower | Enable Sysadmin

  Virtualenvs are a great way to create isolated scenarios where you can experiment with different Python/Ansible modules.

• 11 considerations for effectively managing a Linux sysadmin team | Enable Sysadmin

  Having worked as a sysadmin with many colleagues and later on as a sysadmins manager, I thought it would be good to share some of my experience in this area with hopes that current managers and managers-to-be might find some useful hints. Managing sysadmins is, in many aspects, no different from working with any other group of people: Planning vacations, discussing salaries, setting targets, making certain skills and tools are up to spec. Your management style reflects who you are, and the crew is that fantastic blend of personalities and abilities. Together you can deliver projects and maintain complex technical environments. There are, however, some things you should be aware of that will improve your ability as a manager when you interact with the sysadmins.

• Call for Projects and Mentors: GSoC 2021 – Fedora Community Blog

  Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 10 week programming project with an open source organization during their break from a post secondary academic program. Fedora has had great participation and we would like to continue to be a mentoring org this year too. We are currently looking for mentors and projects. Process of how to apply is described at the end of this blog after a brief info and new changes in GSoC program.

• Storage and Distributed Compute Nodes: Bringing Cinder persistent volumes to the edge

  In part one of our series about Distributed Compute Nodes (DCN), we described how the storage backends are deployed at each site and how to manage images at the edge. What about the OpenStack service (i.e. Cinder) that actually manages persistent block storage? This post will dive into more details.

• Sharing is caring: Building clearer contribution paths to your community

  One of the most important topics in the open source community is "how do we attract more people to our community?" This makes perfect sense because you can’t have a community without people. Given the importance of inviting people to a community—otherwise known as onboarding—you would expect a lot of discussion and debate applied to the topic. And yet, there are many open source community managers frustrated by a lack of new contributors. In this post, we’ll focus on 3 core principles of contributor onboarding.