On attaching zones and linked images

Recently updated IPS was added to OI and it caused some inconvenience to developers. The most annoying "feature" is caused by publisher check: NGZ first several publishers should be the same as GZ's publishers and their stickiness should match.
OK, I've set the publishers according to this rule, but today was surprised by fact that I can't longer set openindiana.org publisher to be non-sticky in NGZ. I've set openindiana.org publisher to non-sticky in GZ, NGZ, but still IPS complains on "pkg install":

pkg install: Invalid child image publisher configuration.  Child image publisher
configuration must be a superset of the parent image publisher configuration.
Please update the child publisher configuration to match the parent.  If the
child image is a zone this can be done automatically by detaching and
attaching the zone.

The parent image has the following enabled publishers:
    PUBLISHER 0: openindiana.org
    PUBLISHER 1: userland (non-sticky)

The child image has the following enabled publishers:
    PUBLISHER 0: openindiana.org (non-sticky)
    PUBLISHER 1: userland (non-sticky)
    PUBLISHER 2: hipster-encumbered

I've rechecked. Both GZ and NGZ had  openindiana.org publisher set to non-sticky.  I've followed IPS advice - detached and attached zone. And zone attach -u failed with the same error.

OK. Time for black magic. I've unset userland publisher. Set GZ and NGZ publisher list only  to openindiana.org (non-sticky). The same issue - IPS doesn't see that GZ publisher is non-sticky now. So, I concluded that  information about parent image is recorded or cached in some local zone configuration file. Looked at zone's /var/pkg and found /var/pkg/linked/linked_ppubs, which listed [["openindiana.org", true], [userland, false]]. I changed this file to [["openindiana.org", false]] and after that could attach zone.

I think I still doesn't understand as linked images work (or should work), but they are starting annoying me...

Hipster 2015.03 is here

We released our last snapshot ISO almost half a year ago. I believe, you want something new. You'll get it. New ISOs were just uploaded to dlc server. Let's see what has changed.

First of all, most evident changes were made in desktop area. We've updated Xorg server and libraries, which allowed us to incorporate some important security fixes from Oracle x-s12-clone and Debian Xorg. Also we've moved much more closely to Gnome 2.32. Most packages were updated to this level, excluding packages which either have a lot of specific patches (like gdm) or just dropped some significant functionality (like cheese, which dropped HAL support in version 2.32). Not everything has gone smoothly. We had to drop trusted desktop support during update. I believe nobody seriously used it under OI. The most annoying thing is that updated Xorg and Intel driver require some DRM updates, which are still not ready. So, if you have Intel video card, either pkg freeze X-incorporation and xorg, or use vesa driver.

General system changes

All Sun Studio-compiled C++ libraries were removed from the system. The libraries were published in their current form to http://dlc.openindiana.org/c++-libs/, so you can grub necessary libraries and LD_PRELOAD them or use in alternative path if necessary. All X/g++/Y packages are renamed to X/Y and moved from /usr/g++ to /usr. We continue delivering system/library/c++/sunpro for the foreseeable future.

Text installer was changed to install OI on EFI-labeled disk by default. Note, in this case the entire disk is erased. If you want to install OI on MBR-labeled disk, choose partitioned install.

Desktop software and libraries

• A lot of desktop libraries were updated
• GTK2 is updated to 2.24.27
• libdrm is updated to 2.4.58
• libX11 is updated to 1.6.2, xcb support is enabled in libX11
• xf86-video-ati driver updated to 6.4.16
• nvidia proprietary driver was updated to 340.76
• Mesa is updated to 10.5.1
• Xorg is updated to 1.12.4. This requires updating xorg drivers and modules. OI-shipped modules will be updated automatically, but if you use VirtualBox, you'll have to update your guest additions to at least 4.3.22 version.
• Glib2 is updated to 2.43.4
• Enlightenment 0.19.3 is added as alternative desktop environment
• fontconfig was updated to 2.11.1
• libid3tag and libmtp were imported from SFE, gmtp is added
• rdesktop is updated to 1.8.3
• transmission is updated to 2.52
• XScreensaver is updated to 5.32
• gnome-commander is updated to 1.4.5
• QT 4.8.6 is added
• emacs is updated to 24.3

• Input Method Selector was added from upstream input-method gate. Bug in svc:/application/desktop-cache/input-method-cache:default service preventing correct input methods functioning in recent OI was fixed. In fact, gtk input modules cache was moved from /etc/(amd64/)gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules to /usr/lib/(amd64/)gtk-2.0/2.10.0/immodules.cache and service has to regenerate these cache files in new locations . So, after update you can safely remove /etc/(amd64/)gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules.

Development tools

• Subversion is updated to 1.7.19
• SQLite is updated to 3.8.8.3
• Python 3.4 is updated to 3.4.3
• Binutils are updated to 2.25
• OpenBLAS 0.2.13 is added
• Mercurial is updated to 3.3
• Ruby 1.9.3 is added
• Ruby 1.8 is marked obsolete, all OI software is switched to Ruby 1.9.3
• Ruby 2.2.1 is added
• Curl is updated to 7.39
• libncurses.so links are moved to /usr/lib(/amd64)
• gawk is updated to 4.0.2, this fixes issues with pkgsrc bootstrap
• MPICH is updated to 3.1.3
• Sun Studio indent in /usr/bin was replaced by GNU indent. Old one is preserved in /opt/sunstudio12.1/prod/bin/indent

Server software

• A lot of packages were updated, including apache 2.4, php 5.4, php 5.5, postgresql 9.3, samba 3.6, mariadb 5.5
• PostgreSQL 9.4 is added
• PostgreSQL 8.4 is marked obsolete
• ISC dhcp server is updated to 4.2.7
• BIND DNS server is updated to 9.9.6-P2
• rsyslog is updated to 7.4.10
• NTP is updated to 4.2.8p1

As always, we are proud to deliver to you latest illumos-gate bits.

There's also a lot of security fixes and small bug fixes.

Of course, I had more ideas than spare time, so some of them were not implemented. We still don't have PHP 5.6 and our OpenOffice package still doesn't work with XML-based document formats. I've looked at replacing cpp with one based on Schilix version, but unfortunately I found it to be not always compatible with Sun cpp. So, I've chosen preserve the status quo and we still deliver Sun cpp. I still would like to see postfix as first class MTA in OI.

I'd like to share some more ideas, which attract me now. First of all, we consider further updating of Xorg and other former xnv components (libXfont, freetype). GCC update is also on the roadmap. Our old samba and cups versions, dependency on python 2.6 and ageing Perl 5.16 make me sad.  Of course, I'd like to see PHP 5.6 in oi-userland and perhaps even look at hhvm.

Trip to Japan. Part one - Tokyo

So, I've finally returned from Japan. I'd like to share my "road-diary". I need some time to arrange my records, so I'll split them in several parts.

Day 1

First day in the way. I'm going to Moscow as there's no direct flight to Tokyo. RZD surprised me giving ticket for 37 place in the car where there were only 36 places. In such way they sell places in conductor's compartment. Another pleasant surprise was that I had a ticket with included dinner. However, I haven't understood why they brought cake before chicken...

Day 2

One more day in the way. Moscow is as always crowded. After waiting for about 6 hours for my plane in Domodedovo and 9 hours night flight I'm feeling sleepy. Funny case in the plane. I've ordered tea. Got a bottle of gin. Asked "is it a tea?". Got reply, yes, this is tea. Hm… At home I'd like such tea, but in the road I'd like to avoid drinking alcohol. Luckily, another stewardess understood me better.

Day 3

The morning begun sharply and suddenly with Sun blinding me from the . window. The weather was perfect. I saw blue ocean and green land. I had to fill two blanks for foreigners and was afraid that I've done something wrong. However, custom officer just looked that all fields are filled and asked for the intended duration of my stay in Japan.

As for yens, we changed money in the airport. 1 dollars is roughly equivalent to 105 yen. To convert prices from yens you can divide by 100 and get price in dollars (or by 2.5 and get prices in roubles).

The first shock is that not everyone speaks English. Expected, but unpleasant. Luckily, even when people don't understand you, they always try to help. But more on this later. Now we were moving to the Tokyo television tower. Precisely, to the Buddhist temple by the tower. They say that the tower itself was constructed as a copy of Eiffel Tower. Don't know, it seems similar, but different at the same time.

There was a concert in front of the main temple, so we entered smaller one. Today is a Culture day and at the same time the birthday of Meiji Emperor (the one who like Peter the Great in Russia cut a window through to Europe for Japan). We've visited service in the temple. Buddhists are practical people - if you pay for the service, the monks will held one for you even if you are not a Buddhist. I've took a picture of the place where people tie ribbons with monks guidances. All predictions, guidances, amulets are valid only till the end of the year. You have to return them to the temple till the end of December and get new ones in January.

There are also statues in temple's garden. You can order one for you. This statue is devoted to the childrens of your family. You should dress them in caps, bring them toys and candles for your children to prosper. Periodically caps and toys are renewed. Statues stay in the temple's garden forever. And burial urns in the local cemetery - no. You should pay significant rent for the monument on it. Each monument holds several urns, perhaps, for the whole family. If no one pays a rent, the place is sold and urns are transferred to the common store inside the temple. On the photo you can see some ski-like sticks. They mark the number of prayers which were held for the dead.

There are also shogun graves in this cemetery. But this part of cemetery is opened for visitors only once per year. In the common part of the cemetery there is one outstanding tomb - the tomb of Emperor's wife who tried to prevent bloodshed between 14th shogun and Emperor in 19th century, when Emperor brought back true power from shoguns.

The last part of the day was devoted to visiting thermae. As I don't like public baths, I just read the book in the common place ahead of baths. Japanese in kimono look nice. But I think it wouldn't suit me :)

A real surprise was non-european sockets. And lavatory pan with a dozen of buttons (it was hard to find out the main one :). In the evening I've went to Indian Cafe. Interesting experience. I've ordered meat with spinach. When I got it there were more spices than meat. Seriously, I firstly thought that it was some sauce for the meat…

After buying a phone charger found interesting device in the hotel room - a charger for everything (this device has a lot of connectors for every gadget). Unluckily it didn't suit to my camera and I had to ask for Japanese-European adapter at hotel registry.

Day 4

In the morning we went to fish market. The main fish is tunny. The largest part of fish are sold in the morning, starting from 4 a.m. to the large customers. Later, starting from 8 a.m. small quantities of fish are sold to local restaurants. You can see a lot of customers in the market in the morning. I expected to see more fish, but it seems not all fish is shown on the counter. However, there are some exotic goods - crabs, calamars, seaweed.

Then we visited garden near Emperor's palace. However, we were not allowed to enter deep into the garden, because there were some officials in the palace. So, we went to Shinto shrine. We were lucky enough to see traditional marriage. Also, near the temple, we saw girls in traditional costumes. At some age girls should be blessed in the temple. This particular temple was devoted to Meiji Emperor. Near the temple there are two lines of barrels for Sake and wine. On the barrels there are labels of wineries which make donations to the temple.

Later we were visiting viewpoint at the 45th floor of some administrative building. They say the design of the building was inspired by Notre Dame de Paris. And they plainly have something common.

After dinner we were brought to one more temple (this time Buddhist). On the ceiling of the temple you can see the dragon fulfilling wishes of the congregation.

Then we visited tea ceremony. My groupmates were whining that it was too long. But I liked it - at last something national and colorful. In the evening I joined several groupmates and we were walking along Ginza. One of them was citing the poems she wrote. They seem rather nice.

Day 5

In Tokyo we were staying in Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa. Really nice hotel. It has a beautiful park. The park even has a pond with big and vivid fish. There is a small Buddhist chapel in the park.

Today we went to some lake by Mount Fuji. The view is picturesque, but today is rather cold here. Why we were sailing across the lake, I became frozen. The ship we were sailing at was made in some medieval style - with sails and cannons. There even were some pirates on the ship which begged money for making photos with them. During our journey I saw several shrines and temples on the banks of the lake. I tried to find some alcohol in nearby shops, because was frozen, but without any luck. Only when we went up by rope-way, I had some luck in finding sake.

We saw the valley of geysers. Local people boil eggs in their water. As water contains a lot of iron, the eggs become black (only the shell, the egg itself is usual). They say that such egg prolong your life by 7 years. Don't know, I haven't eaten it. The eggs are sold to tourists in any forms: the eggs themselves, the toys in form of eggs, the chocolate in form of eggs and so on.

The next stop on our way was at the house of geishas. A strange art. I can't understand what they study for 20 years. But resulting performance is beautiful. However, the music is a bit mournful (reminds me of Mongolian music).

The last point of our program for today was one more public baths. As I don't like it, I walked by the nearest village. The village itself resembles my mother's homeland. There are buildings on both side of the road. Small houses - hotels, museum. Mountains surround the village. Pine trees grow surround the route. The difference is that there are much more trees and expensive cars on the road.

On the way back the guide has told us about life in Japan. I don't like to live such life: marriage matchmaking, working 24 hours per day, wifes manage the house. There are no free high education. Scholarship should be returned after graduating. And, of course, Russian girls are prettier :)

There and back again

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away there has been OpenSolaris distribution. This was the first Unix-like desktop which allowed me to completely replace Windows on my desktop. It wasn't perfect, but a magic of ZFS and IPS made it very attractive. As we now, the sun sets... So, with the end of OpenSolaris era I've moved to FreeBSD and has never regretted about it.

But I always liked illumos and was interested in OpenIndiana distribution. So, now, when I seem to be one of the last interested in it, I tried to go back. Really, migration was smooth. I've bought Nvidia GeForce 740-based video adapter, 4 more GB of RAM and after this I was sure that my hardware is supported by OI.

OI could recognize FreeBSD ZFS pool, so I've detached one disk from zpool, installed OI Hipster from October ISO, imported data and looked at software. As always, software choice for OI if you don't want to compile it yourself is not wast. Yes, there are pkgsrc builds, but they seems foreign in IPS world. So, I used sfe and sfe-encumbered repositories for OI /dev. I hope to use vlc, but vlc 1.1 from sfe-encumbered was a complete garbage. It didn't want to play anything or when it played something it was awful (like no sound or no video or no navigation in DVD menu...) So I stopped on totem/rhythmbox combination and used additional gstreamer codecs from sfe-encumbered. This works, however you should set sfe-encumbered before sfe in your publisher's list.

When speaking about OI one should mention IIMF/IIMD and other IIIM shit. Luckily, it can be turned off. I've finished just adding setxkbmap command to the list of startup applications.

Unfortunately, our Apache OpenOffice from /hipster is still buggy, so I had to use one from AdfinisSyGroup. VirtualBox 4.3.18 from Oracle for Solaris/x64 works fine. I was pleased with our Firefox 24.8.1. Adobe flash plugin 10.1 r85 sometimes crashes. Especially annoying is that it crashes on the flash games which I have to support. At least I've expected that it would not work - the application require Flash 11+. But for other use cases it works. Having working evince, xchm and FBreader seems enough to read documentation. zpool resilvering has completed by 50%. So, now I'm eating my own dog's food.

Hipster 2014.10 is finally out

We are finally ready to present you new OpenIndiana Hipster snapshot and ISO images. We had some difficulties with generating installable "entire", so we had to delay snapshot for a week. But now you can just pkg fix entire to be more stable in constantly-changing Hipster world :) Since last snapshot a lot of work was done. I tried to summarize the changes in this informal "release notes". Please, be sure to read at least Perl-related notices before updating from previous snapshot.

General system changes

We performed migration from GCC 4.7.4 to GCC 4.8.3. New packages are compiled with GCC 4.8.4.
Perl 5.10 is not compulsory now. All perl dependencies were updated to use Perl 5.16 or don't care about perl version. This includes changes to illumos-gate. /usr/perl5/bin/perl now is mediated symlink, pointing to perl 5.16 by default. However, if you would like to compile unmodified illumos gate, you should switch it back to perl 5.10:

pkg set-mediator system-perl=5.10

Perl 5.10 modules which are required to compile illumos-gate are preserved. Other perl 5.10 modules are removed. If you have perl-510 installed on your system and don't need it, you can just remove runtime/perl-510, runtime/perl-510/extra and runtime/perl-510/module/sun-solaris.
During perl update version of perl-516/module/sun-solaris was DECREASED from 5.11 to 0.5.11 for consistency with other illumos-gate provided software. So if you have installed it, please, remove it BEFORE updating to new Hipster snapshot.
Perl 5.16 was recompiled without -Dperl_static_inline="static" flag to avoid creating one more patch for illumos-gate (this can affect perl ABI). So, if you had self-compiled perl modules, possibly, you have to recompile them.
Also, for consistency we renamed library/perl-5/xml-parser@5.12.1-0.151.1.8.1 to library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41. So, if you have it installed (and every desktop system has it), please update it to library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41,5.11-2014.1.2.0 (pkg update library/perl-5/xml-parser@2.41,5.11-2014.1.2.0). Also you'll have to update desktop/system-monitor/gnome-system-monitor if you have it installed.

Development tools and compilers

• OpenJDK was updated to 1.7.60. GCC 4.7 was updated to 4.7.4. GCC 4.8.3 and Clang 3.4 were added.
• GDB was updated to 7.6.2
• Mercurial was updated to 3.0.2
• MPICH was updated to 3.1.2
• ant was updated to 1.9.3
• python 2.7 was updated to 2.7.8

Common software

• bash was updated to fix latest bash CVEs, GNU coreutils were updated to 8.22, CUPS updated to 1.4.8, doxygen updated to 1.8.7, GNU grep was updated to 2.20, gnupg to 2.0.25
• Several packages to work with numerical data were added (datamash, hdf5)

Server software

• A lot of packages were updated, including apache 2.4, apache 2.2, nginx, php 5.4, php 5.5, squid 3.1, tomcat 6.0, postgresql 8.4/9.3
• Ldap backend was enabled for OpenLDAP server.
• Illumos-gate provided wu-ftpd was replaced with proftpd 1.3.5
• Barman was updated to 1.3.3
• NTP was updated to 4.2.7p453
• Bind was updated to 9.9.6

Desktop software

• Firefox and Thunderbird were updated to 24.8.1
• Packages from sic-team incorporation (notably, Mozilla nss and nspr) were updated.
• glib-networking, webkit were added
• Experimental package for Apache OpenOffice 4.1.1 was added. There is known issue with it - it can't create ODF documents. We are working on it.
• ntfsprogs were updated to 2014.2.15 version
• DJVU support was added to evince
• Gnome-pilot and Gnome-pilot-link packages are obsolete now as upstream is dead.

Also there were lot of other small fixes.

As always we ship the newest illumos-gate version, so you can leverage the great work of illumos developers.

Last time I blogged about Hipster I shared some plans. From things which were planned but not made I have to point to integration of new Perl version and 64-bit Perl version. Also we didn't add vlc and other multimedia software to oi-userland because of legal issues. We still miss fsvs. However, I hope we'll find decision for this problem soon.

Now I'd like to share my current plans, the things I'm interested in and the things I'm working on.

First of all, I'd like to look at OpenOffice issue with ODF files. It seriously bugs me, but I don't know if and when I'll be able to solve it.

One thing which annoys me in OpenIndiana desktop is lack of text search in gnome terminal. I have prepared update to gnome-terminal 2.32. It's coming soon.

Also I'd like to look at migration of some XNV components to oi-userland. This should allow us to enhance their packaging (so that it better correlates with oi-userland build system) and later I hope to update it.

I'm seriously annoyed by our out-of-date sendmail, coming from illumos-gate. I'd like to see postfix as a first-class OI MTA. Of course, we'll also need dovecot and perhaps some other mail server software.

Finding security patches for our squid 3.1 is becoming harder. Perhaps we have to update it to recent 3.4 version and also receive SMP support as a pleasant triffle.

PostgreSQL 9.4 release is coming. I want to have it in the gate. On other hand, I think we should remove PostgreSQL 8.4 once 9.4 is landed. PostgreSQL 8.4 has already reached its EOL.

PHP 5.6 is already out. I think, we'll get it soon. As always I hope to use EveryCity's work :)

Our Ruby is amazingly old. We have to migrate to at least ruby 1.9. Ruby 1.9 package is ready and just waiting for official snapshot announcement

I'd like to see some binary blobs disappearing from OI Hipster - like cpp (we can use Joyent version), also I hope once we'll have open source gcc-compiled dmake alternative.

Adding dpkg/apt tools and support for DilOS zones in OI seems attractive and perhaps even necessary thing if we want to better collaborate with DilOS on userland packages.

I hate Roskomnadzor

I don't have good words for them. This organization of bureaucrats and idiots are a real pain in the ass. Yesterday we (South Federal University) had to block all Youtube IP addresses, because our chiefs are afraid of possible fines. We have Internet Provider license and so have to filter "unacceptable" content. After last Roskomnadzor representatives found that several links on youtube, providing extrimist materials, are accessible from our network. We don't have any filtering services, so we were told just to ban all Youtube IP addresses to avoid penalties. What a hell! I've already received a lot of pleasant comments from our users. Really, ignorance is strength!

rude hack to proceed on zoneadm attach error

I have two zones on my build host. One is build zone, serving IPS repository for the whole host,  so I have to be very careful with its updates and another - test one. I wished to update test zone, so issued

# zoneadm -z zonename detach
# zoneadm -z zonename attach -u

and noticed that I detached build zone with repository. zoneadm launched pkg, pkg worked for a while, and then it said:

Evaluation: Packages in zone zonename are out of sync with the global zone. To proceed, retry with the -u flag. 
Result: Attach Failed.

What a hell! NGZ and GZ were in sync... At least both of them were latest /hipster. So I removed all publishers served by this zone from host and zone config.  The same reaction.
After grepping for this message in  /usr/lib/brand/ipkg/attach I found that this message is produced in  the following part of the script ($m_need_update message).

#
# Bring the ngz entire incorporation into sync with the gz as follows:
# - First compare the existence of entire in both global and non-global
#   zone and update the non-global zone accordingly.
# - Then, if updates aren't allowed check if we can attach because no
#   updates are required. If we can, then we are finished.
# - Finally, we know we can do updates and they are required, so update
#   all the non-global zone incorporations using the list we gathered
#   from the global zone earlier.
#

if [[ -z $gz_entire_fmri && -n $ngz_entire_fmri ]]; then
        if [[ $allow_update == 1 ]]; then
                LC_ALL=C $PKG uninstall entire || pkg_err_check "$f_update"
        else
                log "\n$m_need_update" "$ZONENAME"
                EXIT_CODE=$ZONE_SUBPROC_NOTCOMPLETE
                exit $EXIT_CODE
    fi
fi


if [[ $allow_update == 0 ]]; then
        LC_ALL=C $PKG install --accept --no-refresh -n $incorp_list
        if [[ $? == 0 ]]; then
                log "\n$m_complete"
                EXIT_CODE=$ZONE_SUBPROC_OK
                exit $EXIT_CODE
        else
                log "\n$m_need_update" "$ZONENAME"
                EXIT_CODE=$ZONE_SUBPROC_NOTCOMPLETE
                exit $EXIT_CODE
        fi
fi

I've just commented all these checks out and after this zone attach succeed. Zone is working now and I'm glad I don't have to reinstall my build zone....