IBM/Red Hat/Fedora Leftovers
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Outreachy gets US$50000 IBM Open Source Community Grant
Winners are picked through votes cast by IBM's internal open source community.
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IBM awards second Open Source Community Grant to Outreachy
IBM has named internship and mentor program Outreachy as the winner of its second $50,000 Open Source Community Grant. Outreachy is a nonprofit that provides internships in the free and open source software (FOSS) space for people from groups that face under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in the technology industry of their countries.
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Michel Alexandre Salim: Linux in the Time of COVID-19
Rather than consuming the latest upstream kernel within roughly a month of it coming out (when Fedora releases its build), why not use the CentOS kernel? It’s stable (only critical fixes are backported), and since CentOS 8 is relatively new it happens to be the newest kernel officially supported by Nvidia anyway.
For Chef users, we open sourced cpe_kernel_channel, our cookbook for opting to use the CentOS kernel instead of the regular Fedora kernel.
The next obvious step is to run CentOS itself rather than Fedora. Happily CentOS 8 runs well enough even on most recent ThinkPad laptops (let’s forget about that Yoga with a suspend issue). The one notable exception is Bluetooth audio support - bouncing bluetooth and pulseaudio repeatedly to get A2DP working is nobody’s idea of fun. We might need to ship backported Fedora components to address this (ironic, yes). If you see recent commits to our IT-CPE repo adding CentOS support, that’s why.
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Mainframes, DevOps, and Ansible
You probably know all this (and more), but what is Ansible? Ursula K Le Guin first used the word ‘ansible’ in her 1966 novel “Rocannon's World”. The word was a contraction of ‘answerable’, because the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances. Other authors have also used the word. But that’s not what we’re talking about today!
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool that runs on Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It has its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and was acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.
The exciting news is that it’s now available on mainframes as IBM z/OS Ansible, and it enables users to automate z/OS applications and IT infrastructure. It will also enable users to automate development and operations through unified workflow orchestration across platforms. And that makes it a DevOps tool. It can work with existing JCL, REXX, and z/OSMF assets.
Ansible uses modules, which are mostly standalone and can be written in scripting languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby, Bash, etc. If you read further, you’ll find the word ‘idempotency’ being used. This is from maths (and programming) and means that even if an operation is repeated multiple times (for example when recovering from an outage), it will always place the system into the same state.
It also uses the idea of inventory configuration. Inventory is a description of the nodes that can be accessed by Ansible. By default, the Inventory is described by a configuration file, in INI or YAML format. The configuration file lists either the IP address or hostname of each node that is accessible by Ansible. In addition, nodes can be assigned to groups.
Playbooks are YAML files that express configurations, deployment, and orchestration in Ansible. They allow Ansible to perform operations on managed nodes. Each Playbook maps a group of hosts to a set of roles. Each role is represented by calls to Ansible tasks.
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