First of all, stretch your arms to cheer with me!
\o/

Autotest 0.11.0 (codename “Logging party”) was just released. Check out
the release notes for more info.

Please report any issues on our bug tracking system:

http://autotest.kernel.org/newticket

Release repository:

http://test.kernel.org/releases/0.11.0/

Release notes:

http://autotest.kernel.org/wiki/Release0.11.0

Cheers!

One of the things on my TODO list for this week is to review a patchset to test TAP device networking on qemu. While I was researching on the subject, This link has proven to be very useful. Summarizing things:

* A TAP device for the host operating system behaves as a normal network interface. A TAP device is the portal for a given virtual lan composed by qemu hosts.
* In order to make the virtual lan hosts to be able to connect to the internet, one could try several approaches, and Linux Bridging is the most popular among them.

A bridge consists in ‘glueing together’ different network interfaces into a bridge device. When you add your current main network interface (usually called eth0) to the bridge, the network will be unavailable for some time. Also, when you need to use network services such as NFS, you might use a more convenient solution of naming your bridge eth0, but for that you need to rename the original eth0 interface first. The following shell script can set this up for you on Red Hat based systems:

#!/bin/bash
# Release the current dhcp lease
dhclient -r eth0
# Put the original eth0 interface down
ip addr flush eth0
ip link set eth0 down
# Make sure /etc/mactab has an appropriate MAC - interface name pair so
# eth0 gets renamed to reth0 (stands for real eth0):
# [root@myhost ~]# cat /etc/mactab
# reth0 00:21:5E:55:28:7C
nameif
# Bring reth0 up again
ip link set reth0 up
# Create the bridge
brctl addbr eth0
# Add reth0 to it
brctl addif eth0 reth0
# Bring the new eth0 bridge up
ip link set eth0 up
dhclient eth0

Make sure you execute this script in the background:

./bridge.sh &

or as a init script. This way you will get your bridge setup and then add your tap device later simply by doing a

brctl addif eth0 tap0

If you don’t want the mess of renaming your interface, you could use a much simpler approach:

brctl addbr kvmbr0
brctl stp kvmbr0 off
brctl addif kvmbr0 eth0
ifconfig kvmbr0 up
dhclient kvmbr0


But I found this to cause problem with my services configuration (probably due to firewall rules).
That’s it, bridge is already set with your tap device. This post was brought to you by Lazy Lucas (TM) enterprises

My comment about it:

\o/

Launchpad is a very unique project, in the sense it tries to integrate different open source software ecosystems, with several useful services for open source users. If I weren’t too busy I would write a little more about that . Bravo, Launchpad team!

debuginfo rpm packages are very useful in the sense they provide debugging symbols for the programs you want to analyze. I found a quite bizarre bug on the virtualization rawhide packages, and wanted to get a stack trace to analyze, but didn’t have debuginfo packages readily available, so I learned to generate my own packages. As lazy as I am, this blog is my notebook for small things I know I will need again. So here are the steps:

* Install the package redhat-rpm-config
* Get the source rpm for the package you want to build stuff from
* install the source package
rpm -ivh foo.src.rpm
* Go to root’s rpmbuild directory
* build the spec using

rpmbuild -ba foo.spec

It’s done

More small recipes will follow!

Recently, the free/open source community saw many interesting news, I am going to comment on some of them:

* Microsoft will release the EMCA under the Community Promise license, which means good news to Mono. Mono is an open source EMCA + Microsoft APIs implementation. There’s a lot of friction inside the community generated by Mono, lots of people are strongly against it fearing some misterious lawsuit that MS could move against the creators of open source implementations. I, for one, think it’s a good thing to have more high quality open source development tools, I am very happy that all the alledged fears would be dissipated after this announcement.

* Nokia announced that future versions of Maemo will use Qt instead of GTK. Slightly less controversial, seems like an interesting move for Nokia, and the tablet community in general. Nokia LGPLed the library, that has a strong and very professional team of developers, is widely used for companies to do their products and is cross platform. The other underlying technologies (such as DBUS, telepathy, avahi), result of freedesktop.org efforts, will still be used. We should put ego fights aside and choose whatever makes sense for the greater good of the user community.

I am sure there are lots of things I just forgot to mention. Good enough for a quick blog post

Autotest release 0.10.1 (codename “Everybody Loves Python 2.6″) was just
released. This is a bugfix release.

If you hit a bug, don’t be shy and open a ticket on our bug tracking
system:

http://autotest.kernel.org/newticket

Release repository:

http://test.kernel.org/releases/0.10.1/

Release notes:

http://autotest.kernel.org/wiki/Release0.10.1

Now, focus will be put on the next major release (0.11), that brings
several exciting changes. Stay Tuned!

We are here at the last day of FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre). I’ve met many co-workers, talked about several sybjects, had a great time with friends, had very good meals, summarizing, terrific.

Once I get home I will organize my thoughts about the conference and the new opportunities. I brought my vaio computer with broken battery, so I can’t stay connected much.

It’s been a while that I don’t blog. That’s OK, since this is by far the most successful blog I’ve ever started. And, of course, the best way to resume blogging is writing a small, generic post.

I am very happy and grateful about my new job. Now I am a software engineer working for Red Hat. My job is to maintain the test framework for Red Hat virtualization products, based on autotest. I am feeling totally acquainted with the new responsibilities, working consistently and already got the first results of my work.

About Red Hat, the company has a strong free software/open source culture and many talented people in there. I am glad to be a part of the team I will write more about interesting technical subjects in the posts that will follow.

Meanwhile, feel yourself at home I know I didn’t say anything particularly relevant on this post, but you don’t need to be thoughtful and dense every post you make. Blogs don’t work this way

Autotest 0.10.0 (codename “Now I am really going to sleep”) was just released. There are plenty of interesting changes documented on the release notes!

If you hit a bug, don’t be shy and open a ticket on our bug tracking system:

http://autotest.kernel.org/newticket

Release repository:

http://test.kernel.org/releases/0.10.0/

Release notes:

http://autotest.kernel.org/wiki/Release0.10.0

Now, the next “major release” is going to be hot! Prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen

Today is my last day at IBM. I won’t spend much time talking about how amazing those 4 years were. I had the honor to work with talented people, and made great friends that will still stay with me. Great company, great people!

Please, if you have worked with me and wish to keep contact, please send your personal contacts to my personal address at lookkas AT gmail DOT com.

I will still be around on the usual IRC channels. Please don’t hesitate to drop me a message.

And now, going to the next step of my life…