Episode: 1744
Title: HPR1744: Scale 13x Part 2 of 6
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1744/hpr1744.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:41:41

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This in HPR episode 1,744 entitled, Kale-13X Part 2 on 6, it is hosted by Lord Rush and
Blood and in about 63 minutes long.
The summer is post-GoneSQL in space, Brian Lunguke and OpenSusa build service.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com,
get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15,
that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Alright Hacker Public Radio, this is Lord Drockenblut at Scale checking in again and I have
Josh Berkus with the PostgresSQL project and I overheard him talking about some really
interesting things, such one of such being timing issues on the PostgresSQL databases that
are being replicated to satellites so I thought this was something very unique and I definitely
wanted to bring this to you guys so just kind of let him run ramps on and say what he wants to.
Howdy, so what we were talking about was one of the issues that people who have not dealt with them
before have difficulty mentally grappling with on distributed systems, which are replicated
databases, a distributed system, is that clocks are not trustworthy because every system that's
being connected is going to have a different clock, these clocks often have issues and on top
of which it's never possible to simultaneously pull all the systems because they're separated
by the speed of light even if they weren't separated by networks which are much slower than the
speed of light. The extreme example of this, which is what we were talking about is there's a
project where NASA is actually replicating a Postgres database into orbit. They have a
geo-survey satellite that they actually replicate data from Postgres up to and this actually
gives you sort of the extreme version of the problem because time actually runs slightly faster
for the satellite I believe. I'm trying to remember my relativity. It runs at different
or any way. Time, you know, it's not just a matter of malfunctioning clocks, time actually
literally runs at a different rate on the satellite because it's an Earth orbit as opposed to
being on a surface and so therefore if you're comparing when an observation was seen from the ground
to the satellite you have to actually account for this time drift as a real thing and it's
something people don't think about a lot when they're when they're doing systems but really even
if you're not doing something exotic as a system in orbit it's actually a problem for anybody
who needs a system that needs to synchronize you know say two servers that are widely separated.
You know we say you have to take into account that each one of the servers has its own system clock
those two system clocks neither one of them is perfect and they both may be receiving corrections
at a different time and so as a result relative to each other time might look like it's running
forwards or backwards and your software has to take that into account if you expect it to do
seeing things between the two systems like you can't assume that because server B got a message
before server A says that it sent it that that's necessarily an error and a lot of people make
them state-of-riding systems where they assume that's an error and then the moment that you have a
clock decentralization the system shuts down and that Postgres SQL database on the satellite there is
not actually one there but you won't can you describe that set up a little more.
I was talking about the other problem so this is by the way so this is all from a presentation
that we had at PGcon the International Postgres SQL conference which takes place every year in Ottawa
this year it's in June used to be in May and it's going to be in June. There's some NASA guys came
to talk about this and the big thing they were talking about was the issue with getting data to
and from orbit is that on Earth we have this thing that we talk about called bit flipping
you know which is that radiation etc can cause it can obviously cause massively detectable corruption
in data but one of the things that engineers who care about data always worry about is the
undetectable things which are like bit flipping right so a one becomes a zero it was and that's
not still going to be detectable because it takes the shape of valid data it's just wrong in
terms of the real world and one of the things that causes a bit flipping is cosmic rays now on
the Earth's surface cosmic rays are infrequent enough occurrence that this is mainly a theoretical
thing unless you're running at the scale that say Google is but once you get up into orbit
it's no longer a theoretical thing your memory is getting hit by a cosmic ray
not once per decade but once per second and so as a result the NASA engineers were talking about
this thing that they have to do where they basically have to have three copies of the database at
all times and those three copies are constantly peering and comparing their data because bit flipping
happens constantly and whoever loses that contest between the three copies gets overwritten
and that has to run on a more or less constant basis in order to prevent the data from being
completely corrupted so that's another unique situation what are some other you know unique
issues with time or with unique locations of databases that you know people may not
the average admin may never run into but these are interesting problems nonetheless
yeah one of them so one of the problems actually comes when you start running systems in local
time or systems that have to display a local time because there's this issue of changes to time
zones so like you'll see a Postgres update comes out every two to three months and every single
update has a set of changes to time zones legislated by legislators in various countries and states
and cities I in terms of how they deal with daylight savings time in terms of what other time
zone they're part of in terms of where the borders of the time zones are so imagine that you're
actually doing a calendaring application that calendaring application you're booking things in the
future like imagine if for example this is four bank loans where you might be booking things up
to 30 years in the future and then you receive a change to a time zone that affects say a due date
that is 25 years in the future so how does that due date get adjusted you have the sort of issue
with what we call a triple time a triple time zone issue right where you have you have when you
expected the event to be in the past when you expect the event to be now and when the event actually
is which you can only know when the event actually takes place to follow me and and that sort of
thing keeps keeps moving and you have to decide what you're going to do about it in your software
or you end up making a whole ton of hand corrections and and having a panic attack every time
you have a time zone update that affects you it's you know it's it's one of those sort of things
that you grapple with is in and people have a very sort of absolute concept of time that time
is monotonically increasing et cetera but from perspective of anybody has to deal with time as
part of a software system that's a very bad assumption to make because it's not monotonically
increasing in any system that you care about all right anything else you'd like to say to the
hacker public radio community you know any other interesting unique problems that maybe again
you know outside of things that they may normally see but could be interesting things for them to
look into and learn about well one of it as long as we're on this topic Postgres killed 9.4
came out in December and part of 9.4 is an API for building new replication systems on top of
Postgres of which you know a couple are in progress something called BDR and another one called
Sloan II but the reason that we created is an API is we would really there's no such thing as a
single multi master or a single distributed database system to rule them all and so we'd really
like to see people building stuff to suit unique use cases things like replicating the satellites
using that API all right well what is a unique use case you've been involved in directly outside
of that satellite if you were involved with it okay well so one of the fun fun things that we did
years and years ago I was something that we called extremely slow replication which was actually
developing replication system that would work over FTP today you can do this with Postgres pretty
much out of the box but at the time this was Postgres like 7.3 we had to actually hack our own
thing where you could actually take all of the changes you would normally replicate as part of
the replication system and save them to a downloadable file that could be applied by
that could be downloaded by FTP and then applied on the individual sites and and this was because
we were distributing for basically in appliance where the users had subscriptions but they weren't
they weren't necessarily connected to the internet all the time and one question I was asked to
try to ask of everyone I interviewed is what is your favorite text editor I'm in terms of what I
use the most I'm kind of split between Kate and Emacs I use Kate for when I'm doing graphical
text editing on the on the desktop and Emacs when I'm on servers but the problem is that I also
like Joe because it emulates a number of other text editors and it's really really small all right
and sorry I wish I'd caught more of that talk earlier to see if I'd had any more specific questions
perhaps we'll revisit when I you know catch a talk with you later or something oh the look I
said the NASA talk was an Ottawa last year it's not something that was here well I just
meant the conversation that I overheard so and what is your preferred environment you know to
personally work on well this isn't a Ubuntu 1404 desktop and I like that okay the I'm going to have
I have issues with Ubuntu but I have a feeling that if I was running Fedora I would have issues
with Fedora the so I haven't haven't Julie I haven't done a comparing contrast certainly I prefer
working on Linux and the desktop to working on Windows or Mac so all right well thank you for your
time if anyone in the hacker public radio community you know find some of this interesting and they
wanted to contact you what is the best way they can reach out I was able to reach out to me at
joshdepokesql.org and also my blog is database soup so search on database soup and you can find
it all right well thank you for your time and I'm sure you know hopefully someone from the HPR
community will find this interesting useful and we'll see where things go with new interesting
replication models in the future thanks a lot all right ladies and gentlemen load
drop in blue coming from scale again and I have with me Brian one Duke formerly of Linux
action show as many of you might know him that would be the you know one of the easier places to
start but I guess let's start off with what brings you to scale and then we can kind of just go
from there I am at scale being as awesome as possible over the next couple of days I'm here with
Sousa doing a little marketing work with Sousa and I'm here just doing my usual dog and pony
stove show stick where I kind of act like a dancing monkey in front of people for a while that's
kind of the gist of it okay so what is your relationship with the open Zeus project
my relationship with the open Sousa project is basically that I've been an open Sousa fan since
I don't know like the mid to late 90s or so I've never actually been a real big part of the project
itself I'm just kind of an open Sousa fan boy and I work for Sousa on the marketing side but I
mostly do like enterprise marketing stuff like you know business e-crap but so I don't really
work on the open Sousa side all that much other than to just kind of help out at the events man
the booth and tell people why I like open Sousa now I am aware that you have released some projects
using the open Sousa builder what were those again because I can't remember and I want to make
sure people at least know what to look for and get the right names sure sure so it's sometime back
I don't know what was this like two or three years ago I released a thing using Sousa studio which
sort of a way to build basically like an open Sousa respin using a bunch of point and click tools
on a website and I use that to make trial versions and kind of self-contained self-running
build environments and test environments for some commercial software I used to work on
but I don't really do much of that anymore now I just kind of play with tools and and write and go
off a lot cool and now people who've listened to Linux action show would know some of your history
but people on HPR may not know that history some people may not as much what is your history moving
you know from technology from you know the closed world you came from to you know the open world
and kind of what brings you know just that line of events leading up to now you want to know what
my story checkered past is I used to be I worked for Microsoft for a number of years and then I
got sick of that through my hands in the air and I became a Mac developer and I made proprietary Mac
software for for quite a few years until I realized that that was bass backwards stupid and I kind of
got into the open source side of things and started moving my proprietary software to open source
basically through trial and error in a series of mishaps over the years and had some success and
some failures with it but kind of worked towards going to the open source side of things and yeah
now I'm just kind of a you know pure open source pure Linux guy but I don't really do much
software development anymore I used to I used to actually be a software executive I used to work
as like the VP of engineering for games companies and all sorts of closed source very unethical
companies but now I just write goofy poetry and stand in front of rooms and talk sarcastically
about open source a lot well with the hacker public radio community it's a very diverse not quite
so pureist is a lot of the Linux so we don't need to worry about that stuff as much as you know
if this were for a pure Linux show but then how did you get involved in
you know new media you know podcasting and all that and what's been your history there as well
sure so I guess I'm probably most known in that realm for starting the Linux action show probably
back in crap wait when did I start that 2006 2006 that's the year yeah so me and two buddies of
mine were all diehard mac users at the time and at the time at mac world Steve Jobs got on stage
and released a version of garage ban their audio editing software with podcasting tools built in
and the three of us looked at each other and thought we're awesome we should make podcasts so we
made a podcast and it was terrible it was it was bad it wasn't funny the production quality was
horrible but after about six months and many many terrible episodes we got kind of not terrible
and decided to do it a little bit more professionally by a little better equipment and it kind of
coincided with my transition away from being a macu windowsy guy and more being a Linux guy so
we started a show called the Linux action show with me and a buddy and and kind of built that into
the largest litig show on the planet over the next you know two or three years and that's kind of
how I got going with it and then I left that kind of gave the the show and the production company
that we built around that show to to my co-host and kind of went off and started working on other
shows and doing my own stuff and you've recently re-entered that realm haven't you I have I have I
started actually we put together a couple of buddies put together the Linux podcast or super
group as we kind of felt it was myself from the Linux action show and we I pulled in we pulled
in a John O'Bacon and Stewart language formally of lug radio which was our chief competitor
to the Linux action show it wasn't really a competitor we like to pretend like it was a big
competition but really we didn't care all that much and we also pulled in a guy named Jeremy Garcia
who runs Linux questions dot org which was one of the other big podcasts and we kind of created
this amalgamation of mildly annoying a Serbic Linux pro Linux guys and kind of created this show
we called it bad voltage and I don't know why we called it that John O'Bacon formally of canonical
came up with the name and we all hated it but now it's stuck so we're screwed and we have to call
it bad voltage forever and just for anyone dealing with bad voltage issues whether it be audio or
electrical let me just say a APC can clear those problems up for you quickly that probably isn't
going to help us all that much I think our problems run a whole hell of a lot deeper than just some
electrical issues so you're doing marketing now what are the things you do just for enjoyment and
you know the what are the things that you enjoy playing with the most right now in you know some
of the new stuff coming out in the Linux ecosystem there's actually a couple of things that I've
got going on right now that I think are that are going on that I'm playing with lately I've been
towing a lot with building my own like game consoles and the like so I've been trying to build a
a Raspberry Pi based handheld game console and I started a video series where well I put my hand
in a puppet's button a puppet actually it's pretending to make the game console out of a Raspberry
but that's neither here nor there the focus is the Raspberry Pi with a little screen built into it
and I've been trying to build it using off-the-shelf components without having to have like a 3D printer
so I've been playing around with things like what can you do with a whole pile of duct tapes and
some popsicle sticks and a Raspberry Pi like what can you build if you have absolutely no budget no
engineering skills and no access to a 3D printer and it turns out you can build quite a lot it just
always looks like a pipe bomb when you're done but that's kind of what I've been playing a lot with
otherwise I've just busy running the normal slew of latest Linux distros here and there because
I'm a glutton for punishment. I'll encounter I'll encounter that pipe bomb comment with I have
followed concepts like building handheld consoles for a long time through Hackaday I've been
following Hackaday for probably within a year of its actual inception and they've had a lot
on there and you can definitely build some very good looking handhelds you know you have to spend
a little bit more a little bit and I'm talking you know you as little as $5 or $10 sometimes to
buy a case that is you know good quality rugged case to you know put your systems inside up.
Yeah you totally totally can the thing is I'm an astoundingly lazy man and while I could take like
an old gameboy and gut it and even just cut it a little bit and I could fit all the guts into it
and have a nice little handheld I kind of I don't really want to have to use tools other than maybe
a screwdriver and a pair of household kitchen scissors like that's my tool set that's my toolbox I
have that in about eight different colors worth of duct tape sitting on my desk and literally
a bunch of popsicle sticks used of course because I'm not going to go out and buy fresh plain
popsicle sticks that is highway robbery I'm going to buy popsicles and then reuse the sticks
because then they're stained and it looks more legit and then see what I can build and the end
result is stuff that looks like it's just MacGyver together but really you can do quite a lot with
it like like if you have a Raspberry Pi and you want to have a handheld game console you need a
battery right we just go out you don't need to buy like a fancy battery and wire it up to the GPI
old ports and all that go buy one of those little USB battery packs off of eBay for five dollars
that you'd use to charge up your phone or something like that and duct tape that little sucker to
the back of a Raspberry Pi boom you've got a battery powered system on the go and it looks stupid it's
bulkier than it needs to be but you build it yourself and it didn't take any tools and that's
I think that's some of the cool stuff that's out there right now that's what I've been tinkering with
yeah the the watching the maker movement here over the last few years explode and I would say
the big pivotal moment and maybe you could you know agree disagree you know give your comment
was when make magazine came out that was a you know things had been starting to build to that point
and it seemed like when make magazine that first issue came out things just exploded yeah yeah
no make magazine is pimped if you don't get an issue of make magazine you're you're a bad person
and you're not a real geek that's that's just how it is right now that in my opinion it's probably
one of the seminal publications out there for true nerdiness and it's awesome um are you involved
with um a hacker space at all in near you is there one near you have you tried to seek any out
hell no I love a good hacker space I want to make sure I'm clear about that there's awesome ones
right now I live in western Washington there's good ones in Bellingham and Seattle this place is
all over to go and build crazy stuff with awesome tools but again I have no engineering experience
I do not know what I'm doing but I know how to wield a pair of scissors and some duct tape so
literally my hacker space is my kitchen and a corner of my bedroom with a table if I were to go
to a hacker space I would be taking a valuable table space from someone who's building something
important with actual tools and actual build quality and that just is not my uh my belloax see I'm
gonna have to call you on that one because I've been to several different ones and you know
there's always something someone can add and with what you're doing you know someone I've seen
young kids you know if they're doing things if they could see the start of you know something like
that you know they could get some ideas from you you know or turn around and go here's how you
use a dremel you know spend $20 by yourself a dremel so you can get a little bit of a precision cut
yeah they know that's that's actually pretty fair you know if I were to go to a hacker type
space undoubtedly every eight-year-old in the place could show me how to do it better than I'm
currently do I get so really I would like to learn from pre-pubescent children but I also don't
want to feel bad about myself so I sit in a dark room and and use my duct tape and and no one
judges me until I post videos on the internet and then everyone judges me but but I do it by myself
and I think that's that's part of the thing for me I love the hacker space for a communal thing and
if I was building anything that was at least slightly more ambitious than what I do I think I'd
probably get involved but I just I just hide okay and you know I'm also where you are you know
longtime gamer it seems like you're really into retro games as I understand it you've also
worked for game companies what's your you know gaming history my gaming history is long and
complicated so I've worked for a lot of game companies actually let's back up a little let's go
what got you started in video games let's see if the console that got me started is the same one
that maybe got you started all right first first rounds of machines would probably go back
first game first systems I was gaming on weren't consoles they were early computers you know I
was Commodore 64 and Apple 2 knockoff clones that was that was where I really got started and then
from there it was Atari 2600 for me that's where I got I got going was my first console was a 2600
with that totally bitch in numeric keypad you put an overlay on top of and play simulation I
use air quotes to do like space simulation games and those were those were some good times I love
my 2600 I actually don't I owned a 2600 and a dozen different types of controllers I do not
remember the number pad one I do remember that being more on like the Odyssey and the Coleco
vision having number pad controllers 2600 one was new to me yeah no I don't think there were many
games that actually used it this was you know my my stepdad bought one and he couldn't quite figure it
out I don't think and he thought it was cool but he just kind of relegated it to my bedroom very very
quickly and I was a very young kid but it was who's awesome I may move to the Nintendo
winner team and system and everything else after that and master system but the 2600 was my first
actual console what would you say looking at all the games you've played throughout time what
is the one one or two that are kind of those pivotal games for you the ones that kind of define
your gaming experience and ones you can still go back to easy answer two games one of them is the
worst game ever made and that would be the original computer space made by Nolan Bush and the
reason for it is this if any of you guys have ever seen one of these it's this weird futuristic 1960s
looking fiber plate get glass cabinet that plays this game that's a lot like Asteroids it's
basically a simple Asteroids-ish type game but it's terrible the controls are bad it just doesn't
play well but the neat thing about it is this there's no software in this game if you open up
the back panel this is the first arcade game ever made and you look at the board the board the
actual hardware is the full game is the logic for the game and Nolan Bush and all the guy they want
on to you know create a tarry and pong and everything actually laid out the circuit board the little
diodes on it were all in the shape of the sprites that you see on the screen so you actually see
these little rockets in multiple angles of rotation on the board itself and when I saw that
that made me realize that video games were badass because even crappy video games were built
in a badass way and I thought that was awesome the second game was tank tank was awesome was made
by key games but was which was also owned by Nolan Bush and all the time and this was the first
video game ever that used graphics in memory it had actual sprites that were stored in memory
and it was a nice two-player game if you ever have played the Atari 2600 combat same game except
much much less but that was tank in the old arcade those were the two games that got me super stoked
very cool it is very cool for me for me I'd have to say you know some of those games I come back to is
berserk on the Atari 2600 then moving up to the NES it would have to be the game that started it
and the game that was the clone of it and that's Castlevania and then Ninja Gaiden being a
almost an exact clone in many ways if you lay those the two screenshots of those games
over each other it they are almost dirt Ninja Gaiden is almost a direct ripoff but the thing is
instead of being one of those cheap knockoffs that tried to go nowhere it innovated the platform
or series dude hell yeah side note I still stand that it said Ninja Gaiden despite the fact that
the 1980s movie The Wizard taught me otherwise was it 1980s when The Wizard came out was at
early 90s when Super Mario 3 came out there was but there was a part in it where they're going to
the video game tournament and the guy letting the little kids into the video game tournament
where it was like oh you do you have to play the next game is Ninja Gaiden and it was really exciting
I believe that actor was the same one who played um he was also in the police academy movies
I can't think of the guy's name but he was one of those similar bald actors during the late 80s
early 90s I can't remember I can't remember that but you and me should go watch The Wizard
sometime if we get a chance just so we can figure this out because we can't look it up on Wikipedia
or IMTP that would be way too easy and I'd have to put this down so um
batter's getting a little low so um what are three let's just ask a prediction on technology over
the next few years where do you you know see things going or where do you want to see things going
over the next few years in the Linux world I have no idea
easy enough so um one other question I've been
one other thing I um I comment on technology I don't actually predict technology I just
comment on it in less sarcastic way um one other question I was asked to try to ask during
the interviews I got is um favorite text editor favorite text editor no it's G-Edit
without a doubt I mean Kate's good and all but G-Edit no doubt well if you're G-G-K guy fair enough
no no this isn't up for debate you can be running on Katie but still run G-Edit because you're
human and that's what humans do my thought humans just no no no I thought humans grabbed a pen
no no no this interview is over I want to flip a table right now done fair enough well ladies and
gentlemen uh this is Lord Dawkins Blue with Brian Lunduke at scale have a good night
all right Lord Dawkins Blue checking in from scale again and I'm sitting here with Marcus
and what's your last name sir Marcus fine from Linux magazine Germany very cool and um we just
brought up the um open or the suits open build service if I've got the name right and you've got
some interesting information on that that I think the hacker public radio audience might want to
hear more about yeah I was in at first them in Brussels in the Belgium two weeks ago and it was
Susie open Susie Stefan Kulo who said that Susie is thinking about releasing the
Sles the Susie Linux enterprise services service servers sources oh my god the Susie Linux
enterprise service sources into its open build service that means that they can use lots of tools
that Susie has been using for open Susie like quality assurance with open QA which is what I'm
here for I'm giving a talk on that um it's automated quality testing and other stuff they can use
that on automated builds that the Susie build service is doing out of the sources of the enterprise
product basically they do not they they didn't offer a time plan an agenda or whatever for when
to release it that he just announced that they will that they will release it and well to me
basically this seems like not only the first step but a major step towards releasing the sources
of of the Susie Linux enterprise server so and if I'm understanding this right we could begin to
start seeing a Sus equivalent to things like CentOS and um scientific Linux too yeah probably
that was the that was of course the the discussion that almost sparked immediately at first
in Brussels when when Kulo said that and he was asked if Susie would try to stop people from doing
so and he said well no we wouldn't buy and even though they didn't have a more precise plan
but I think this is one thing that probably probably will happen and they seem to be really
convinced that this sort of contribution that they get will make their product better so to me
it sounded like an opening another opening and definitely and um
sus and open sus has some of the you know by far and away some of the most interesting tools out
there the open build service su studio things that I really wish other communities would replicate
or maybe in some cases what I would love to see is things like um you know more communities
working together directly with them on the open build service at least so but um what are some
of these other you know interesting tools out there in in case you know people in the HPR community
haven't heard of them and a little bit of a description well you pointed out right that the open
Susie build service and a Susie studio are two of the major things that Susie did develop and
sort of give to the to the community throughout the last years um the build service itself is
often misunderstood it's not really a server farm just run by Susie there's many contributors
many companies who sponsor that and all that stuff and it's used to build packages and it's
but it's not only packages for Susie it's packages for Debian you can build packages for Debian or
Fedora or other distributions on this service that's also why I've heard that many redhead people have
had a look at it but redhead is so big they probably tend to install it themselves rather than
use it which it is meant for it's meant it's meant for it's meant as a community thing and uh so
but the redhead people are pretty much aware of this stuff and that this is a good thing that Susie
invented there and gave to the community and there are other tools you mentioned that there are
other tools that that exist around this sort of infrastructure or ecosystem like the one I'm
presenting on today this is open qa open quality assurance is it an automated test test tool that
the Susie that open Susie people developed because they found it tedious to test distributions it's
always the same you install you click you type in the same commands and it's tedious for a developer
just running it over and over and over again and they developed a test suite out of that which is
starting a virtual machine with the the new open Susie the daily version that they have
boots up the ISO image and and thus many tests and they have this this whole thing has grown over
the last three years or four years it's really become big and as you can see here I have a video
here running Fedora inside that so they all they even made it possible to test Fedora installations
within this open qa and open quality assurance and folks I'm sitting here watching the video I'm
watching and I will try to make sure to get in contact with email via Marcus so I can get the
link so you can watch the video but I'm sitting here watching an automated install happening now what
kind of thing what kind of results can people get out of this as far as you know what kind of
feedback can they expect well the the feedback is best viewed on the website open qa dot
suzi org I'm just trying where is it my website yeah open open qa dot open suzi dot org and you
can have a lot lots and lots of test results starting from screenshots so this video that you see
is just a sequence of screenshots of every single test that the tool does that and you can see
screenshots from every single stage you can see why an install failed you can see why how it
succeeded and you can have what I'm what I'm showing right now is a long table of test results
which shows one line per ISO image so they are creating several ISO images per day and the the
web server is doing automated testing on them testing until KDE even Thunderbird installation and
Thunderbird profile setup such integrated desktop matters are being tested and what they need now
is contributors to help to write tests there the tests are simple they call the needles and it's
very very simple it's basically Jason Jason data and pearl files and it's just image comparison
that's all but it's it has grown and it's fairly complex and you get if you're doing it ISO
development images development this is something that helps getting rid of the tedious testing
definitely it looks really interesting what would you say is the kind of learning curve if I
were you know creating say a fedora spin for my own uses how difficult would it be for me to
you know being not exactly as much of a power user as I want to be at some points to
create these tests as far as I have not developed the test of my own but as far as I'm told it's
not that it's not that difficult to create a test of your own I know Richard Richard Brown of
Susie he has done this fedora test and it's his video that I'm showing and it's it's just you
can do it online on you can have a look at it at open q a dot open Susie org for example
I'm showing the bootloader image for example and you can see here there's this what they call
needles and the needle is a test a test defines a range in an image and in this in this image in this
square it within this image there has to be for example the word installation succeeded
if it's not there then it has failed and that's all you have to write you can do the web interface
okay what I'm looking at is I see the beginning of the installer okay the first one kind of
was a little hard because of the crosshair version but on the second one where it's you know more
else okay that that was just your okay that's more your cursor there and that instead of what
the final needle is I guess I'll show that with the with the failed test because this image is split
and on the left half of the image you see what the system expects on the right half of the image
you see what the booted virtual machine returned if it's the same it's not pretty you don't it's
it's not very it's more self explaining if there is an error I guess so here we have a test that
has failed let me see if this the red one here we see the red is marked because in this installation
the first boot failed and let me see what he expected and wow screenshot
no I should no I'm not prepared for that I should have the better example for a failed situation but
you have an editor where you can have the success in the left part of the window in the left
part of the image and the the fail in the right side so you can see exactly why it is that it failed
and that helps developers a lot because they can go and see what what has been changed since yesterday
since the last working test and now we have a failed test so what has what has been changed since
yesterday so the developers can order that QA testers can go to the developers who have changed
anything relevant to this part since yesterday now what is what are the underlying technologies
for open QA well there has been a project called auto inst that Dan had vitamin developed and
and yeah started with he didn't well he didn't start it but he took it and he created
open QA and basically it's a set of it's it's JSON files who store configuration and results
and we have pearl files pearl tests who do the needles sort of who do the testing of special things
and the image matching and well and it's kvm the kernel virtual machine or qemoo who starts
who are used to start well they are the hyperwizers to start the iso images to boot the iso images in
what else do we have well that's that's basically all there's nothing more in need it
when fact i've got on this laptop i've got the i've got open QA running i installed it here
and i i'm not finished yet and the next step would be just import an iso image and
and then run the automated test but it's it's pretty easy but who would need who would
who needs it himself so it's there's a web service for it that's okay and that's that's
enough for most people so i can go to the open qa site and i can upload my iso directly there and
do my tests if i'm understanding you correctly yeah should be possible you need a login and then
it should be possible yes it's not installed it on your own it's easy just at you just install
open susi tumbleweed the rolling release then add the right repositories and install open qa it's
all documented on the open qa website all right what other um
intrat because open susan open sus has always had some of the more interesting i think
wider technologies um what are some of the other interesting technologies that
susan open sus might have that people might be unaware of well i'm i'll find pretty interesting
what susi does in the last years in their enterprise software stuff and for example they were
one of the first two int who introduced better FS you say better FS better FS you hear both
okay and the what i also like is the snapper the snapshot tool that they developed which makes
it pretty easy to roll back to some some state that you had yesterday and you don't have to take
precautions for it it's it's just there as a boot option you and you can just revert to the last
working state of your system so and uh well and yeah if i'm not mistaken uh snapper is actually
just a graphical front-end for controlling features of uh butter FS well it's not a graphical front-end
it's uh or it's sorry it's uh it's a tool for managing features of uh butter FS
and but it's an opens yeah and it's like and there is a a yass module for it
so you get it's it has also a module integrated in the system administration tool
from susi susi has yassed y-a-s-t their their system administration tool uh yet another system
tool i believe is what it stands for and you can uh you can choose
uh screen snapshots from there for example that's also something they added and there's many
tools like that um what else do they have what is new well they have a new storage server i think
which is pretty new to be published in february um i believe that is on this
directly on the susi of things built on um sef exactly it's on sef and i think it's due in
must must we publish those days made february i was told right and their cloud systems like uh
also obviously open stack based which is uh the susi cloud and i think it's it's about
4.0 version there's also right now about to be published and they say that uh this is the
the open stack version that is the most easy to be deployed and you're here you're with
Linux magazine from germany but what's your um involvement with the open susi project
or is it just you use a lot of these tools i use a lot of these tools i'm well i'm German i started
with susi Linux 20 years ago so that's my personal connection to them there uh and uh but
in the end it's like that the susi is pretty common in germany i mean here in the us it's
more or less this redhead country when it comes to enterprise Linux and in germany it's quite the
opposite there's a lot of susi and not that much redhead uh in companies and that's just that's for
historical reasons i believe and it's uh well redhead is uh two and a half times the size of susi
i think but it's as i said it's it's susi is not that known in the us as they are in germany
but they're very common in germany and and in special branches as well so they are pretty strong
in in high performance computing they are i think at a point of sales they are also pretty strong
and what else is it the cloud the one i forgot one thing the super cool yeah the big ones
top 500 um i i know there is a kind of a solid solid but not huge
sus or open sus community out there i tried um sus or sled at one time and also open sus
and me and yes at the time we just did not agree on things at the time and i know i need to come
back and look at it again because i personally i'm a kd fan and the fact that you know open sus
their flagship desktop is kd shoot is a reason i should come back and check out things instead of
you know fedora which you know i i'm a fedora ambassador i'm very you know i very much enjoy that
community part of it um i just me and gnome we aren't the greatest of friends
yeah you see i've got two laptops here for this presentation one is running fedora and one is
running open susi says it all and they're both running kde i'm not i'm not happy with gnome so
i can't work with gnome it's it's better than than other systems but i'm not nuts it doesn't
fulfill my needs and use it as a usability but that's also just as you maybe as you as you're used to
i've been using kde for years in a long time so and with the modern modern distributions i think
they're getting closer as at least when it comes to the desktop and i'm yeah so and i agree with
you that susi has had quite some work in the past times to be done with with yes i remember the
times when yes would overwrite configurations that i made and i was wondering why does this why
isn't this working anymore and i'm so well said and i and i i that was the problem i ran into if
you were running eight grow you know especially if you were running a graphical desktop setup you
basically at the top of config files it would tell you don't bother changing things because
we'll overwrite it yeah exactly and that has but thank god that that has a lot of a lot has changed
there thank god now as a you know journalist with you know when it's um magazine in germany um
what tools do you use to you know write publish edit what do you you know what you kind of use
there well i'm in the happy situation that our publishing house is has defined plain text
text files as master then we are using a tool chain of self-programmed xml and pearl tools to convert
these text files into anything that the printing printers industry can use for it's pretty common
that they are using Adobe products and pdf's or whatever so the but we have separated content
from layout we split we have the content the content is in text files in plain text files with
links to images we have our own markup for that that has been working for 20 years now we are 21
years old and i guess well i've been doing this job for 10 years and almost nine years
something like that and uh it has advantages if you separate layout and content and it has
advantages if you have your made your master files as plain text because you're flexible and since
a few years our development team made several scripts to convert those text files into xml for
example or recently into e-pub and other stuff other new formats and that's just one thing that
i learned we are ahead of other publishing houses because they uh yeah we are close to the technical
stuff so that's probably well but in the end i think uh when it comes to the printed edition
you know there's still it's maybe difficult even how no matter how good uh uh
linux tools for layout like stylus stylus?
scribbles scribbles scribbles again yes like scribbles have become we tested it regularly but
it's still like that that the publishing companies what the publishing companies the printers
want uh doby created pdf for example but we i can i only have to work with uh stuff like that with
with uh with uh the propriety software very rarely thank god so are the um the tools you're talking
about has linux magazine germany made those available or are they um closed off to just you guys
i don't want to say they're closed stores because you know i just can't think of the right term
for the moment i have no i have no idea it's just a bunch of pull scripts i guess pretty long
pull scripts i never touched them because there's some developers who know what to do where to do
i think it's on 95k files i don't know if every anybody ever had the idea of publishing them because
they are so specific to our needs uh and i have no idea if we have never been asked if anybody wants
them needs them or whatever so i have no idea i to be honest i have even no idea if anybody at my
company ever thought about releasing them or because who would need it?
perhaps someone who wants to try to start you know a small you know purely digital
magazine at this point you know with the tools you have in place they could
you know be able to take those and get quickly started instead of trying to use you know
scribis i'd love to see somebody try because it took me quite a while to get uh
accustomed with with the layout or the tagging the mock-up language that we developed for it
it's a small set of uh uh layout things but i i to be honest i really do not know if anybody ever
thought about releasing it on or if there has been a decision not to release it i don't know really
i have no idea well i will like i mentioned earlier i will be sure to be an email contact with you
because this is something i would like to follow up on just to be able to it'd be interesting
yeah i mean and what was it? Lennox voice recently started up you know with these other you know with
Lennox magazines kind of becoming a boutique product i think there is room for more you know
more of these things to come out but you know if they could have you know quicker access to the tool
you know just you know a tool set to get them up and running that could be
don't mix up Lennox magazine Germany and Lennox magazine US right it's not Lennox pro magazine US
is something different right i'm trying to make sure that's why i keep saying Lennox magazine
Germany to make sure that distinction exists exactly now what's um your preferred text editor
what's my preferred text that i'm well i'm okay to eager i'm using Kate if i'm on the command line
i'm using vi never dug into e-max that much i had to i i i i knew i knew how to handle it i knew how to
use it but i never got stuck with e-mix i got i got vi and Kate probably now one markup publishing
tool a friend of mine told me about that i keep meaning to check out is and it comes out of the
python community is called syncs and one of the really nice things is it's very much like almost
a series of make files you have a text file with your content there's markup language to it
and the nice thing is at the end it is almost as from what i've seen of it what i've read on it
so please don't take this as a hundred percent true at the end when you've got your you know document
ready you issue almost like just you know make install file and it can it'll you can have it
you know spit out an e-pub for you pdf several different kinds of content but you know you're still
just a second here you want to do and what's your name so we don't get things two crossed up
here i'm Lance Albertson i'm with the OSU open source lab at Oregon state cool and i will
we will sit down and do some talking a little later but um so you have some experience with
syncs since i've brought this up and maybe you can add to it and correct anything i might have
said glaringly wrong i don't think you've said anything wrong per se but we've had an amazing
experience switching over all of our internal documentation wiki stuff and any documentation really
over to syncs doc um we actually utilize uh the read the docs uh theme which has a lot of mobile
capability already built into it and it's open source it's on github so we just integrated into
our jingens build server it does a linting and everything and just have to learn a little bit of
restructured text and other than that it's an amazing tool we can we do all our documentation
with pull requests now and github that's great yeah i will say one of my greatest frustrations as we
come with uh tablets e readers becoming very cheap ubiquitous that sure connectivity is
really really common a lot of times but when i am reading certain types of documentation and stuff
i want offline versions and i've only seen very few things that make it possible to grab you know
an e pub version a pdf version something that i could put on my you know you know
electronic reader of you know insert your choice so you know and i would love to see more of that
yeah we're actually using um another syncs doc project called higher glyph to do all of our
presentation and actually the presentation i'm doing it scales going to be using higher glyph
so i write my entire presentation in a single restructure text file i run mixed slides and it
makes an html 5 version of the site that i just cycle through i go to my web browser and it just
shows everything and higher glyph is an extension for syncs so you can take that original format
and then still be able you can now do you know e pub pdf um can you do something like um open or what
the native format for lebray office can you have it spit out does things as far as i know i
doesn't spit out to any of the open file formats as far as i know but i haven't looked into it
but you know now we've talked about here what's things it has you know with higher glyph you
you can now spit out you know four or five different things from one file so definitely great
and because we're here and i'll share i'll ask you again what's your preferred text editor
my preferred text editor is them and just because um mark is here it brought it up um is that
period or do you have a graphical side of things you use i really don't use anything on the
graphical side sometimes i might use g-edit to do a simple copy paste that maybe vim doesn't
do nearly as well but i usually stick to vim on command line all right um gentlemen is there
anything else you'd like to um tell the hpr audience all right and um mark is if people wanted
to try to contact you you know to be able to learn a little more about some of the stuff you're
working on what's uh the best way they can get in touch with you well there's this website
called google and just look for marcus with a k and linux and you'll find me i'm or at marcus
file at linux at linux magazine so i'm the only marcus at linux magazine so you'll find me
and you sir uh just look up lance albertson open source lab or lance at open source lab and you'll
find me all right well gentlemen thank you for your time this is lord dragon blue at scale
signing off you've been listening to hecka public radio at hecka public radio dot org
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