openATTIC 2.0.12 beta has been released

We're happy to announce the availability of openATTIC version 2.0.12.

Some highlight of this release include some UI and workflow improvements on the host management page as well as improved input validation for FibreChannel WWNs. The WebUI now uses the user's web browser's local storage to keep track of personal UI settings like the sort order/criteria for data tables.

Also new in this release is a new Ceph management page that lists all existing RADOS block devices (RBDs) and their details on the selected cluster. The backend and REST API has received a lot of new Ceph management functionality - please see the openATTIC Ceph REST API overview on the openATTIC Wiki for details. We also added initial Nagios/Icinga monitoring support for keeping track of a Ceph Cluster's overall health status and storing it in RRD files using PNP4Nagios. This functionality provides the foundation for the upcoming Ceph status dashboard, which will also display historic cluster performance data (OP-85). If you have troubles with updating your current development system you may consider the following topic on our Google Group "Heads-up: Nagios-related configuration changes and development configurations".

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Today i looked for a solution to shrink a root filesystem wihtout rebooting a livecd.

After a while i found something on a mailinglist i want to share with you.

Thanks a lot to Andrew Wood and Tom Hunt for this instructions.

1. Ensure the system is in a stable state

   Make sure no one else is using it and nothing else important is going on. It's probably a good idea to stop service-providing units like httpd or ftpd, just to ensure external connections don't disrupt things in the middle.:

   systemctl stop httpd
   systemctl stop nfs-server
   # and so on....
   

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Looks like June will be busy month for me: I have three talks/presentations about openATTIC scheduled in my calendar for the coming weeks. If you would like to learn more about the architecture of openATTIC, recent developments and the current state of Ceph support, here are some opportunities:

• On Thursday, 23rd of June at 12:00 CEST, I'll be talking about Ceph and Storage Management with openATTIC at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany.
• On the same day, (June 23rd) at 1 pm EST (19:00 CEST), I'll be talking about the same subject during a Ceph Tech Talk (thanks to Patrick McGarry for having me!)
• On Wednesday, July 6th at 17:00 CEST, I'll be giving a presentation about openATTIC: Ceph and Storage management on SUSE Linux for the SUSE Monthly Open Source Talks (MOST).

I look forward to these opportunities to spread the word about openATTIC. Hopefully this will help us to attract more users and obtain feedback and comments on our general direction. See you there!

In addition to managing "traditional" storage resources like CIFS/NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel, we started adding Ceph management capabilities to openATTIC 2.0 some time last year.

For us, Ceph is the answer to users looking for ways to scale their existing storage systems from individual storage nodes into a scalable, distributed and self-healing storage cluster, where an openATTIC node can also perform as a "bridge" to translate between legacy applications that still depend on established storage protocols/methods and this new storage paradigm.

In this blog post, we'd like to give you a brief summary/update on the state of support for the Ceph distributed storage system in openATTIC.

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We're happy to announce the release of openATTIC version 2.0.11. One of the highlights of this release is, that we've made further progress regarding the Ceph-related development:

In addition to the pool list of our last release, it is now possible to list placement groups and view the Ceph cluster status. Besides the ability to display a list of OSDs, we have added a drop-down menu to be able to select the current Ceph cluster in the WebUI on all Ceph pages. Once a cluster has been selected, the GUI will keep the selection when switching between Ceph-pages.

Furthermore, the functionality to add a volume in the GUI has been extended. It now offers all supported volume types to the user, depending on the selected pool. When selecting a volume type, the WebUI will offer a description text which also links to an external article with additional information about the selected type. This should make the decision easier for the user when considering which one would be best for the user's purpose.

As requested by a customer, we have added the possibility to openATTIC to grow the size of Btrfs pools.

Also, we fixed a bunch of bugs, extended and updated the documentation and took care of quality assurance as well.

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Today we tried to resize a btrfs volume and always get the following useless error:

"ERROR: unable to resize '/media/test/' - Invalid argument"

We came to the idea, that this is maybe a hardcoded limit or problem, because we figured out that we can resize volumes which are bigger than 256MBit.

I have taken a look into the source code of btrfs and found something in the ioctl.c file in line 1584:

1584        if (new_size < SZ_256M) {
1585               ret = -EINVAL;
1586               goto out_free;
1587        }

After I talked to some guys from the btrfs channel on freenode I figured out that this limit is arbitrarily.

That was the reason I opened up the bug report on kernel.org.

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118111

I hope it will be fixed soon.

Two weeks ago, I attended and spoke at the Vault Linux Storage and Filesystems Conference in the Raleigh Marriot City Center in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Organized by the Linux Foundation, the event was co-located with the Linux Storage, Filesystem and Memory Management Summit that took place in the days before. LSF/MM is an invite-only gathering of key Linux Kernel developers, to discuss kernel development topics from person to person instead of a mailing list.

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Yesterday, we released version 2.0.10 of openATTIC. The highlights of this release are our re-designed GUI and the ability to retrieve a list of configured Ceph pools with their configuration details.

As mentioned earlier in our last Sneak preview of the openATTIC GUI redesign post, the new design was necessary after we have decided to drop the "SmartAdmin" template. You may take a look at the re-desidned GUI on our demo system.

Furthermore, version 2.0.10 comes with a new Ceph related GUI integration. You may have noticed the new Pools menu item which can be found under the Ceph menu. If you have ceph and openattic-module-ceph installed and appropriately configured on your openATTIC host, you will be able to see the list of available pools of your Ceph cluster with their corresponding details. The appearance of those details is going to be refined in our next releases.

Also, we fixed a bunch of bugs, extended and updated the documentation and took care of quality assurance as well.

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Still work in progress, but we'd like to share some preview screen shots of an upcoming redesign of the openATTIC 2.0 web interface.

The redesign was necessary after we decided to drop the "smartadmin" bootstrap template. The update is almost done, so stay tuned for the inclusion in a future release!

We hope you like the new layout!