SUSE Studio

Repositories Spring Cleaning!

noreply@blogger.com (Flavio Castelli) — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:12:00 +0000

Over the next few days, we will gradually remove these duplicated 3rd party repositories from Studio. Official and private user repositories will not be affected. Affected appliances will be automatically updated.

What impact might this have on you?

Most users will not notice anything different, but some may encounter a couple of side-effects:

Your 3rd party repositories in Studio may now have a different name.The name of the repository being used by your appliance may change, but you don't have to worry about that because:
- Your account was not compromised - the change is done by our cleanup script.
- The contents of the affected repositories (if any) should be identical.
- The official and private user repositories are not affected.
Your appliance may have software resolution errors. This is rare, but can happen if the explicitly requested software version is not available in the new repository (eg. the old version is no longer in the repository nor in the Studio cache). If this happens, Studio will propose the following solutions:
- Add the latest version of the package: This will explicitly require the latest version of the package from the repositories in your appliance.
- Do not require a specific version of the package: This removes the explicit version constrain, pulling in latest version instead.
- Remove the package: No longer install the package in the appliance.

If you must have the old package, you can either package it inside of a dedicated repository with the openSUSE Build Service or upload the RPM to Studio.

Please contact us via the forum or mailing list if you have any questions or problems.

Why are we doing this?

It’s spring time once again and so we’re busy with housekeeping to maintain a reasonably fast and responsive site, even as the number of users grows. This week’s spring cleaning target is the software repositories in Studio. There are three types of software repositories that can be added to your SUSE Studio appliances:

Official repositories: Repositories added by the Studio administrators, like openSUSE 12.1 OSS and SLES 11 SP2 x86_64.
3rd party repositories: Public repositories hosted outside of susestudio.com that have been added by Studio users, such as those from the openSUSE Build Service and PackMan.
Private user repositories: Repositories that are automatically created and hosted by Studio whenever you upload a RPM to your appliance in the software tab. These are private to your appliance and are only accessible by Studio.

For faster appliance builds and improved reliability (eg. builds will still work if the external repository is temporarily down), all RPMs from these repositories are cached by Studio. Whenever a new repository is added, all the RPMs within it are added to the download queue and bumped up if it is required by an appliance build (the build process waits for the download to be completed).

With more than 18,000 repositories, these cached RPMs use quite some terabytes on our storage servers. There are often duplicated RPMs from different repositories, so we use file deduplication to reduce the overall storage footprint.

Duplicate repositories were initially avoided by checking the repository URL, but this is of course insufficient as it does not handle repository mirrors. Thus it now checks the repository ID, so we can detect these mirrors and remove them. This does not reduce the storage footprint much since the RPMs are already deduplicated at the file level, but it does save on the repository metadata resulting in faster and cleaner repository searches.

What is coming next?

We are close to completing the first phase of revamping our backend repository and package handling service, allowing us to overcome the limitations of the current system. Stay tuned, we will blog about this in the near future.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 in SUSE Studio

noreply@blogger.com (Björn Geuken) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:51:00 +0000

Last Monday SUSE announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2 (SLES11 SP2), SUSE's enterprise Linux offering.

Today we enabled SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 templates in SUSE Studio. You can now create new appliances based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 and play with the new features they provide.

The two most prominent features are clearly the updated kernel 3.0, Linux Containers and first enterprise support for btrfs. SUSE also introduced the new forward looking development approach. For Studio that means that every SLE11 SP2 template will include repositories for Service Pack 1 and 2.

Like always, we will disable the previous SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 templates within the next weeks and provide an upgrade path that allows to port existing appliance configuration from Service Pack 1 to Service Pack 2.
Building and configuring SP1 based appliances will still be supported for a couple of months.

Update

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 appliances can now be upgraded to Service Pack 2!

Simply open your SLE 11 (GA or SP1) appliance, and click the friendly Upgrade button. If there were any issues, they'll be reported to you on the Start tab.

If you would like to maintain parallel versions of your appliance, simply clone your appliance before upgrading.

Deploy to EC2 from SUSE Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (André Duffeck) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:41:00 +0000

It's almost been a year since we launched our EC2 management page which allows for uploading your appliances to the Amazon cloud. We are constantly improving and extending it, but up to now it has been lacking integration with SUSE Gallery.

If you wanted to run an appliance from Gallery in EC2 you had to clone and build an EC2 image of it first. In order to improve this workflow we came up with this:

Notice the new "Upload to EC2" button in the cloud section? It will directly take you to the EC2 management page where you can start uploading this appliance right away. Now we have a nice shortcut which renders the old way of cloning and building it first redundant.

Hyper-V appliances are GO!

noreply@blogger.com (James Mason) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:25:00 +0000

Here at SUSE Studio, we strive to support the widest range of formats, both physical and virtual, so you can be assured that your Studio-built appliance will work wherever you need it. To that end, we've added support for building the Virtual Hard Drive format, for use with Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server.

The VHD format will be initially available as an experimental feature - you can sign up via your (recently updated) account page. With those features enabled, you will be able to build VHD images for both SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 and openSUSE 12.1. For SUSE Linux Enterprise, when you enable the VHD format on the Build tab, you will be prompted to add a couple of extra packages (this isn't necessary for openSUSE 12.1; everything you need is already in the kernel).

As a little bonus, we're packing VHD files into .zip archives, instead of our usual .tar.gz, so Windows can open them without any additional software.

Manage your appliances using SUSE Manager

noreply@blogger.com (David Majda) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:54:00 +0000

If you use appliances built by SUSE Studio in server environments, you probably know that you need to monitor them, update their configuration, deploy security fixes, etc. In short, you need to manage them. SUSE offers a product that helps exactly with these tasks — SUSE Manager — and SUSE Studio now offers a simple way to manage your SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1 appliances using it.

To use the new SUSE Manager integration, simply visit your appliance configuration and select Configuration → Appliance, then select the Integrate with SUSE Manger checkbox. Fill in the hostname or IP address of your SUSE Manager server and the name of a bootstrap script that will be used inside your appliance.

When booting your appliance for the first time, it will automatically download and run the bootstrap script, registering your appliance with SUSE Manager. Afterward, you can manage the appliance like any other system.

Learn more about SUSE Manager by watching videos, reading its documentation, or simply trying the free evaluation version.

New user account page and WebHooks

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Sing Jie) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:44:00 +0000

User account page
SUSE Studio gets a new user account page!

Gone are the days where you had to navigate to different pages just to view or edit your personal information (e.g. EC2 credentials). Now, you can easily access your information as they are all within a page, divided into 4 different sub-tabs.

We like it and we hope you like it too!

WebHooks
Other than the new user account page, we have added support for WebHooks - a simple event notification/callback mechanism. All you have to do is to supply an URL in the WebHooks section within the user account page.

Next, choose one of your appliances and build:

SUSE Studio will POST to the URL when the build completes.

The POST contains details of the build, which includes a download URL:

You may make use of the details to run specific scripts or to download the built image automatically. For example, you may have downloading and processing of the image in a Sinatra server:

With WebHooks, you can do many interesting things, and we believe you will. More details on using WebHooks and some sample scripts can be found in our documentation.

Do let us know what you think!

Full functionality for openSUSE on EC2

noreply@blogger.com (Dominik Bamberger) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:49:00 +0000

If you were waiting for Studio to support the latest version of openSUSE on Amazon's EC2, listen up: Your wait is over. The same goes if you tried to upload an older version of openSUSE to EC2's latest region, Sao Paulo. Studio finally offers full functionality for all openSUSE versions on all EC2 regions. Of course, SLE still offers a wide range of advantages over openSUSE. Just think about long term support, stability or getting updates for your system. However, if you chose to create your appliance based on openSUSE, you are now finally able to use Studio to take your first steps into the cloud.
Have a lot of fun!

Get going with DB2 - easier than ever

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Schweikert) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:57:00 +0000

New DB2 appliances are now available in SUSE Gallery, as seen in the search results shown below.

For quite some time the DB2 Express-C appliances (32-bit, 64-bit) have been available in SUSE Gallery. Without any publicity, these appliances have been found by a relatively large number of Gallery users, who have downloaded or cloned these to build new appliances. The great thing about these appliances is that they are published by IBM.

The continuous collaboration between IBM and SUSE has now led to the release of not only DB2 Express-C appliances, but also DB2 Enterprise Trial appliances (32-bit, 64-bit). Users can obtain a license key from IBM to easily activate these appliances as full fledged DB2 servers. Without a full production license, the DB2 Enterprise Trial appliances are only fully functional for the evaluation period of 90 days from first boot. When combined with SUSE registration, one can deploy a fully functional and fully supported DB2 server in a matter of minutes.

All appliances use the DB2 9.7 FP5 release. For details about the release, refer to the IBM DB2 site. One notable new feature in DB2 Express-C is Oracle compatibility.

Updating SUSE Linux Enterprise based appliances

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Schweikert) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:39:00 +0000

Recently a number of questions regarding the options for updating SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) based appliances were posted to the mailing list / forum. This article provides insight into this subject matter.

In SUSE Studio it is just as easy to create an appliance based on SLE as it is to create an openSUSE based appliance. One of the differences in the choice of the base distribution (SLE or openSUSE) is that SUSE Linux Enterprise is the "pay for" distribution developed and maintained by SUSE, while openSUSE is a community developed and maintained distribution. SUSE Linux Enterprise offers hardware certification, exceptional reliability, stability, and the backing of the industries best support team.

An appliance built with SLE in SUSE Studio contains all updates available at the time. However, the appliance does not contain the repository configuration necessary to receive future security and bug fix updates.

Update repositories for SUSE Linux Enterprise are accessed through the Novell Customer Center (NCC) and require appropriate credentials. Credentials for NCC are part of the various support offerings for SLE available from SUSE. The offerings can be grouped into 3 levels:

Basic Support
Standard Support
Priority Support

Details about the SUSE support offerings can be found here. Maintenance updates are available to subscribers for up to 10 years.

Update management for appliances follows four models, depending on the use case and the number of appliances. We'll look at these models in more detail below.

Distribution of a SLE based appliance

In this case you basically fall into the ISV category, whether or not you actually bundle your own software with the appliance is immaterial. Your value add can simply be bundling open source software that is not supported by SUSE, and you support it for your customers.

In this model of using SLE in an appliance you have two options to enable your customers to receive updates. One option basically sets up a 2 way relation ship for your customer, meaning a relationship between your customer and yourself and a relationship between your customer and SUSE. The other option establishes a relationship between yourself and your customer and a relationship between yourself and SUSE, but this latter relation ship is hidden from the customer.

The choice you make determines how you build your appliances and thus you have to think about how you want to handle this ahead of time. For the option that establishes a 2 way "support" relationship you need to include the "yast2-registration" package. Preferably you will include the registration step in the firstboot procedure. With the registration package included in your appliance you can then provide your customer instructions about how to obtain access credentials from SUSE. Once the customer has their access code they can register the appliance with NCC and the update repositories will automatically get added to the appliance. Money flows from your customer to you for the appliance and from your customer to SUSE for the maintenance updates, and support of the base OS if the customer chooses this option.

From an appliance build point of view this is very easy for you, but because of the dual relationship at the customer end this option is a bit more cumbersome for your customer. If you decide that the customer should only deal with you, then your appliance does not get the "yast2-registration" package. In this case you enter into a so called OEM relationship with SUSE.

Through this relationship you get access to the SLE update repositories. Using SUSE Lifecycle Management Server you then make the updates available to the appliances you provide to your customers. In this case you need to setup the SLMS infrastructure and have some server that can be accessed by the appliances you distribute over the Internet. SLMS also allows you to distribute updates over other channels than the wire. Therefore, using this approach makes things a bit easier at your customers end, as the customer only has a relationship with you and the appliance the customer gets is already set up to receive updates. From your perspective things are a bit more involved as you will need to run the SLMS infrastructure.

Obviously there are a number of details in both setups that need to be taken care of but this paints the bigger picture of how things work when you distribute an appliance based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

In house use of an SLE base appliance

If you do not distribute an appliance based on SLE, but you want to build SLE based appliances for your shop and are interested in getting maintenance updates for these appliances you have 4 options. In any of these 4 options you will have a relationship with SUSE.
The first two options basically mirror the options described above. You can still register each system/appliance/image with NCC using the "yast2-registration" module. You can also run SLMS and update your internal appliances with this mechanism. In this case the SLMS infrastructure does not have to be accessible from the outside world.

The third option is to use the Subscription Management Tool. In this case your appliances register with the SMT server and use it as the source for updates. The SMT server in turn is connected to NCC (Novell Customer Center) and obtains maintenance packages from NCC. In this case you can automate the registration process of your appliances with your SMT server as you will know all the required parameters. This automation can be built right into your appliances and when you deploy any given appliance for the first time all the "magic" happens and your system is automatically is configured to receive updates from your SMT server.

The latest addition to the SUSE product portfolio is SUSE Manager and with it you can also manage your SLE based appliances and other Linux systems. In this case you just build your appliance and then once it's up and running you pull it into the fold of "machines" to be managed by SUSE Manager from within the SUSE manager interface. Following this approach your appliances will then get updates from SUSE Manager, which in turn access' NCC.
On the surface the use of SMT and SUSE Manager may appear quite similar. However, these are two distinct options and the tools (SMT or SUSE Manager) have vastly different capabilities. SMT is a passive proxy between NCC and your appliances, or other SUSE installations. SUSE Manager on the other hand is an application that provides active management capabilities for you appliances and other Linux systems such as, configuration management, monitoring, and logging, and of course update management as mentioned above.

When building appliances based on SLE it is pretty easy to get updates for these appliances. If you distribute these appliances you have two options to provide updates to the appliances in the field. Using SLE based appliances in your shop affords you 2 additional options to handle updates of your appliances.

Managed Clouds with RightScale

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Schweikert) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:28:00 +0000

Having your head in the clouds and managing virtual machines (VMs) which run there is one thing, really getting there is another. An often neglected step in cloud discussions is the cloud on-ramp, or How does the VM providing the needed functionality get there in the first place? Also frequently ignored is the question of What's inside the VM? Maybe these questions are "ignored" as they are inconvenient and not necessarily easy to answer. Similar to driving a car on the highway - once on the highway going along with the flow of traffic is easy, but navigating the on-ramp poses a set of challenges that make many uncomfortable.

The on-ramp to the cloud can take various shapes. One is to pre-build task specific VMs (eg. a web server), which is easy with SUSE Studio and KIWI. If you have multiple functions that needs to be distributed between multiple instances, you can build one image each and then launch them in the cloud.

Another way to the cloud is to customize the VM on startup - start with a standard base image and then install the necessary packages and configuration on first boot. This is the approach taken by RightScale and we are happy to annouce that these base images are now available in SUSE Gallery, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours.

When launched from the RightScale interface, the base image/VM connects to the RightScale servers and pull in any scripts that need to be executed. All connections are outbound only, hence safe from a security perspective and does not require any additional ports or special access.

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use it:

Upload the RightScale base image (32-bit, 64-bit) to your EC2 account.
Log into your RightScale account and create a "Multi Cloud Image" (MCI) based on the EC2 image.
Important: Add the "provides:rs_agent_type=right_link" tag to the MCI during creation.
Create a "Server Template". The template may contain a script that installs the required packages and configuration. The following example shows the basic setup for a web server:

These RightScripts can be written in pretty much any scripting language, as long as it is installed in your base image. With a server template complete you can create a "Deployment" in RightScale. Launch your EC2 image from this deployment and the script in your server template will be automatically executed during boot up.

With RightScale, instead of managing multiple images you manage server templates and their content using the RightScale interface. Thus, on the surface you are just managing a different thing when compared to the approach discussed earlier. Once there are multiple clouds, RightScale does offer a reduced management surface. It is possible to reuse existing server templates and thus the setup of a web server, for example, in cloud A and cloud B does not require a new build once you have a base image in both clouds.

RightScale supports only enterprise Linux distributions. For details, please refer to their support page.

Upgrade your appliances to openSUSE 12.1

noreply@blogger.com (David Majda) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:46:00 +0000

Last week we enabled one-click upgrade of old openSUSE appliances to just released openSUSE 12.1. The upgrade works the same way as with previous versions. Just open your old 11.4 (or even 11.3 or 11.2) appliance, go to the Start tab and click on the Upgrade button in the bar at the top.

How does the upgrade magic work? Generally Studio tries to change repositories to their 12.1 equivalents and sometimes adds or removes few packages to ensure everything works smoothly. You can see what exactly was done in the log accessible from the bar at the bottom of the Start tab.

Sometimes the upgraded appliance will need few tweaks to work. Just inspect the log, see what was changed, and apply any additional adjustments. Let us know what you had to do on our forum or mailing list so we can improve the upgrade in the future.

If you are not satisfied with the upgrade, you can always revert to original version by clicking the Undo upgrade link.

openSUSE 12.1 in SUSE Studio

noreply@blogger.com (David Majda) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:02:00 +0000

openSUSE 12.1 is officially released today. This is a major milestone both for its users and developers, mainly because of new GNOME 3.2, systemd integration, and many other exciting features.

In what is becoming a tradition, we are supporting the new openSUSE release in Studio right from day one. We prepared the usual set of appliance templates — just click on the Create appliance link and select the one you like.

openSUSE 12.1 templates in SUSE Studio

Limitations

If you explore the configuration options for openSUSE 12.1 in Studio, you may notice that the EC2 format and LVM configuration are not available yet. These will be enabled once we are confident that they work flawlessly with this new release.

Also note that there are a couple of minor known issues:

Login prompt in text-mode appliances may not be initially visible after boot.
Loading the list of modified files in testdrive may hang in some cases.
Building an exported appliance in KIWI can fail when installing the libncurses5 package.

We are working on resolving these as soon as possible.

Testdriving openSUSE 12.1 GNOME desktop

Testdriving openSUSE 12.1 KDE desktop

What about upgrade?

With previous openSUSE and SLE releases we offered one-click upgrade of your older appliances to the current version, so that you don’t have to re-create them from scratch. We will have this for openSUSE 12.1 as well and plan to release it next week.

Note that while openSUSE 11.4 templates will be removed soon, the existing 11.4 (and older) appliances will work and you will still be able to create them by cloning. Upgrade to 12.1 is optional.

Big thanks

The SUSE Studio team would like to give big thanks to the awesome openSUSE community. They patiently listened to our problems, quickly fixed them, and helped us ensure that everything works smoothly. It would not have been possible to have same-day release of openSUSE 12.1 in Studio without their support.

Now that you know everything go and have a lot of fun with openSUSE 12.1 on SUSE Studio!

EC2 revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Dominik Bamberger) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 12:23:00 +0000

We redesigned our user interface for the EC2 management page. Not only does it look much nicer and cleaner now, but we also added the possibility to change an instance's type after it has been uploaded to Amazon's Web Services.

Go ahead and check it out for yourselves. Even more so, if you haven't tried it before. Just take your favorite appliance and upload it to the cloud. It's really as simple as it looks. ;-)

ACE editor for scripts editing in SUSE Studio

noreply@blogger.com (Lee Sing Jie) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:37:00 +0000

Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor (ACE) is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript. It is written for Cloud9 IDE and is used in a number of other projects, including GitHub.

Over here, at SUSE Studio, we integrated ACE editor into our scripts editing section, which allow you to edit boot, build scripts and AutoYaST configuration XML.

Key Features
Here are some key features of ACE that are integrated into SUSE Studio:

Syntax highlighting: Provides syntax highlighting for Bash and XML scripts. This syntax highlighting is similar to IDEs and you should be familiar to it. This allows easy debugging and spotting of careless typos.

Highlighted lines: When navigating through the code with the cursor, the entire line will be highlighted for easy viewing.

Tab indentation: You can do tab indentation easily and naturally just by pressing Tab on your keyboard, without having to worry about losing focus of the textarea.

Ctrl-S Saving: Save your data as often as possible. Use keyboard shortcut to save, by pressing Ctrl-S.

Quick Comparison
Here is a quick visual comparison with/without ACE editor:

Without ACE editor


With ACE editor

See it in action
Here's how it works:

1. Create a new appliance or edit an existing appliance:

2. Navigating to Configuration - Scripts:

3. In this page, you will be able to edit build, boot scripts and the AutoYaST configuration XML, with the ACE editor. Enjoy!

As always, do let us know if you find any bugs or have any questions.

Contribution
As ACE editor does not originally support Bash scripts, we forked the original source for ACE editor and included syntax highlighting for Bash. To benefit all, we submitted a pull request back to the original source and is pending approval.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

One-click WebYaST 1.2 in Studio

noreply@blogger.com (Björn Geuken) — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:55:00 +0000

Some days ago SUSE released a new version of WebYaST, WebYaST 1.2. It provides better performance, a polished layout and new role management.

For those of you who are not familiar with WebYaST. It is an easy-to-use, web-based configuration and administration tool. That means that you can configure hardware, network, services, security, and many more in a browser.

Since we offer a one-click configuration for WebYaST for a while we decided to upgrade it to 1.2. If you want to add WebYaST 1.2 to your appliance, you just need to go to the configuration tab of and click on the appliance icon. Then scroll down to the 'Additional options' and check the 'Enable WebYaST' checkbox.

This will add the WebYaST 1.2 repository which matches with your applaince's basesystem, add all neccessary WebYaST patterns & packages and do some additional configuration.
For more information take a look at this Blog.

In case your appliance already has WebYaST 1.1 enabled you can upgrade to 1.2 by un-checking the Enable WebYaST checkbox and proceed with the instructions above.
This is not required for openSUSE 11.4 appliances, as the 11.4 WebYaST repository got the newer packages since a while.

And that is how WebYaST 1.2 looks like:

SUSE Studio for the big iron

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius Schumacher) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:24:00 +0000

After a couple of months of hard work we are now happy to introduce the next version of SUSE Studio for onsite installation. It comes in two editions, the Standard Edition, including everything you need to create, share, maintain, and configure your software and virtual appliances, and the Advanced Edition, which additionally supports workloads for System z, the big iron.

For System z we support creating zFCP and DASD images, and you can use all the familiar features of SUSE Studio, adding your software via packages or overlay files, the simple configuration, and of course testdrive for testing and modifying your system just with your browser. The new SUSE Studio also comes with a bunch of other features. It deploys to Amazon EC2 with just a few clicks. It has full versioning capabilities, supporting various release work flows. It includes a local version of SUSE Gallery for sharing your work with your peers and other groups. And there is more, like version 2 of the API, covering all functionality of Studio, support for building SUSE Manager enabled systems, or integration with LDAP for authentication. Most of the features you can try out in the online version of SUSE Studio. If you want to take full control and use Studio behind your firewall, or you want to benefit from the features only available in the onsite version like System z support, the new release of SUSE Studio for onsite installation is made for you. See our new shiny new suse.com website for details how to get it.

The new hosted releases of SUSE Studio come bundled with SUSE Lifecycle Manager and WebYaST. With SUSE Lifecycle Manager you have full control of updates to your appliance. It provides the tools to combine updates of OS, middleware, and your application into one consistent, tested stream of updates, and delivers them to end users.

WebYaST provides a customizable web interface for configuring your appliances. It comes with an elegant interface, which can be used to do essential configuration of users, groups, roles, system and network services, to monitor the status of your system, or to apply updates. WebYaST can easily be integrated with systems built in Studio, so it's the ideal way to provide a lean administration interface for all kind of software and virtual appliances.

We are proud of our new product, and we hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do. Have a lot of fun with it :-).

Using AutoYaST for customizing your appliance on first boot

noreply@blogger.com (Christoph Thiel) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:32:00 +0000

When building appliances with SUSE Studio, I was often challenged with finding a way to configuring an appliance on first boot. The most common use cases like locale, time zone and network configuration are being offered by Studio already.

Selecting these options will make Studio include the required packages and configuration to guide the user through a YaST workflow on first boot.

But is there an easy way for further customizing your application on first boot? Yes, there is! Enter AutoYaST and it's powerful "Ask the user for values during installation" feature.

Switch to the Configuration tab, select Scripts and check the "Run AutoYaST profile on appliance's first boot" option.

Next we need to create the AutoYaST profile, which will be run on first boot. The profile format is an ASCII XML file.

Here is a simple example, that will create a simple ask dialoge "Enter the user for this machine" and promt for input. The result will be writen to /tmp/answer_user.

Now let's look at a more complex profile, that uses a script to validate the users input. This technique can also be used to process the users input and e.g. change config files accordingly.

Note, the user provided value is present in the script as $VAL. If the script exit code is non-zero, AutoYaST will show the script output as an error.

Make sure to always include cont which will tell AutoYaST to process the question. (In AutoYaST terms the first boot is also called stage "cont".)

For more details refer to the AutoYaST documentation on this feature which is available here.

One more way to customizing your appliance on first boot is to simply place scripts or binaries in /usr/share/firstboot/scripts. They will be executed automatically by YaST on first boot.

Update for openSUSE 11.4 AMIs on EC2

noreply@blogger.com (Dominik Bamberger) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:34:00 +0000

We updated all openSUSE 11.4 public AMIs on Amazon EC2! (All built with SUSE Studio.) If you are using 11.4 on EC2 we highly recommend switching to those updated AMIs. We ran into some disk space related problems with the old ones and re-released these with 5GB of virtual disk space to ensure there is enough space for your software packages.

Region	Type	Arch	AMI ID
US East (Virginia)	EBS	i386	`ami-e626de8f`
US East (Virginia)	EBS	x86_64	`ami-d226debb`
US East (Virginia)	S3	i386	`ami-b2768edb`
US East (Virginia)	S3	x86_64	`ami-e468908d`
US West (N. California)	EBS	i386	`ami-d3471596`
US West (N. California)	EBS	x86_64	`ami-dd471598`
US West (N. California)	S3	i386	`ami-274c1e62`
US West (N. California)	S3	x86_64	`ami-8f4c1eca`
EU West (Ireland)	EBS	i386	`ami-9e2e1fea`
EU West (Ireland)	EBS	x86_64	`ami-982e1fec`
EU West (Ireland)	S3	i386	`ami-f81f2e8c`
EU West (Ireland)	S3	x86_64	`ami-201e2f54`
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	EBS	i386	`ami-647d0536`
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	EBS	x86_64	`ami-6a7d0538`
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	S3	i386	`ami-aa750df8`
Asia Pacific (Singapore)	S3	x86_64	`ami-38760e6a`
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	EBS	i386	`ami-8e3e948f`
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	EBS	x86_64	`ami-903e9491`
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	S3	i386	`ami-5e319b5f`
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)	S3	x86_64	`ami-72319b73`

List of public openSUSE 11.4 AMIs. S3 = instance-store.

And remember, Amazon is offering a free usage tier, which means you can now run an openSUSE 11.4 micro instance in Amazon EC2 completely free of charge for one year!

SUSE Gallery Desktop Client

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Barringer) — Fri, 27 May 2011 09:59:00 +0000

When I started working on extending the SUSE Studio API to support SUSE Gallery, I developed a desktop client at the same time as a testbed. It's been a bit neglected over the last 6 months, as my primary after-work project takes up a lot of my time, but it's usable nonetheless. In an effort to motivate me to work on it again, and to find other contributors, I'm happy to announce the SUSE Gallery client: With the Gallery client, you can browse, search, view details, download, write to a CD or USB key, or execute the image directly in a virtual machine. There's rudimentary support for connecting to Testdrive, but the built-in VNC client isn't very reliable , so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Packages have been built for openSUSE and Fedora, but it should compile on any platform that Qt and LibVNCViewer support (including Windows and Mac). And of course, contributions and bug reports are most welcome!

It's never been so EC2 access the cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Dominik Bamberger) — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:48:00 +0000

We already introduced SUSE Studio's new EC2 management page as a beta feature back in March. Meanwhile, there have been a couple of changes and improvements. The first major change is obviously that it is no longer a beta feature and available for all users. Just build an EC2 image of your favorite appliance, enter your AWS (Amazon Web Services) credentials and you are ready to go. Speaking of AWS credentials: Since we no longer need S3 (Simple Storage Service), it has become even easier to use SUSE Studio. You only need to fill in your "Access Key ID" and your "Secret Access Key". No need for certificates or private keys any more. Why did we get rid of S3, you might ask? The reason is, that it is now possible to use EBS (Elastic Block Storage) for all appliances, including openSUSE-based ones. And again, things just got easier. Additionally, you may now choose which instance type should be used for your appliance. There are seven different setups to choose from. A detailed description of those instance types can be found on Amazon.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP4 support

noreply@blogger.com (David Majda) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 08:51:00 +0000

Yesterday, Novell announced the release of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP4, its enterprise Linux offering. The update is intended primarily for customers that can't or don't want to upgrade to version 11. As usual, the release comes in two flavors — desktop and server.

Continuing a tradition started with openSUSE 11.4, SUSE Studio offers support for the newly released version from the start. You can now create new appliances based on SLE 10 SP4 templates and also upgrade your SP3-based appliances.

What if you need to stay on SP3 for some reason? You don't need to worry, SP3-based appliances are still supported and will continue to work.

The forecast is cloudy: show it on your desktop

noreply@blogger.com (James Mason) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Our amazing design staff made some new Studio-inspired wallpapers for you, celebrating our forays into the clouds - especially direct deployment to EC2.

As always, have a lot of fun!

Introducing dister, a Heroku like solution for Studio

noreply@blogger.com (Flavio Castelli) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:35:00 +0000

(This is a cross-post from Flavio's blog.)

SUSE Studio is an awesome tool, with a couple of clicks you can create an openSUSE/SUSE based system and deploy to your hard drive, an usb flash, a live dvd, a VMware/VirtualBox/Xen server and even Amazon EC2 cloud. Suppose you want to create a tailored SUSE Studio appliance to run a Ruby on Rails app, this is a list of things you have to take care of:

install all the gems required by the app (this can be a long list).
install and configure the database used by the app.
install and configure a webserver.
ensure all the required services are started at boot time.

You can save some time by cloning this appliance shared on SUSE Gallery, but this is still going to be boring.

Dister to the rescue!

Dister is a command line tool similar to the one used by Heroku (one of the coolest ways to run your Rails app into the cloud). Within a few steps you will be able to create a SUSE Studio appliance running your rails application, download it and deploy wherever you want. Dister is named after SUSE Studio robot. It has been created by Dominik Mayer and me during the latest hackweek.

How it works

We are going to create a SUSE Studio appliance running a rails application called "SUSE history". The app uses bundler to handle its dependencies. This is its Gemfile file:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.0.5'

gem 'pg' gem "flutie", "~>; 1.1"

As you can see the app uses rails3, the flutie gem and PostgreSQL as database.

Appliance creation

Move into the suse_history directory and execute the following command:

dister create suse_history

As you can see dister has already done a couple of things for you:

created an appliance using latest version of openSUSE supported by SUSE Studio (you can use a different base system of course)
added the devel:language:ruby:extensions repository to the appliance: this repo contains tons of ruby packages (like mod_passenger)
installed a couple of things:
- devel_C_C++ pattern: this will allow you to build native gems.
- devel_ruby pattern: provides ruby, rubygems and a couple of development packages needed to build native gems.
- rubygem-bundler: bundler is required by dister in order to handle the dependencies of your rails application.
- rubygem-passenger-apache2: dister uses passenger and apache2 to deploy your rails application.
- postgresql-server: dister noticed suse_history uses PostgreSQL as database, hence it automatically installs it.
- rubygem-pg: dister noticed suse_history uses PostgreSQL as database, hence it automatically installs the ruby's library forPostgreSQL.
uploaded a custom build script which ensures:
- mod_passenger module is loaded by Apache
- both Apache and PostgreSQL are always started at boot time.
- all dependencies are installed: this is done only during the first boot using bundler.
- the database user required by your rails app is created. This is done only during the first boot using some SQL code.
- the database used by the appliance is properly initialized (aka rails db:create db:migrate). This is done only during the first boot.

Upload your code

It's time to upload suse_history code. This is done using the following command:

dister push

As you can see dister packaged the application source code and all its dependencies into a single archive. Then uploaded the archive to SUSE Studio as an overlay file. Dister uploaded also the configuration files required by Apache and by PostgreSQL setup.

Build your appliance

It's build time!

dister build

The appliance has automatically being built using the raw disk. You can use different formats of course.

Testdrive

Testdrive is one of the coolest features of SUSE Studio. Unfortunately dister doesn't support it yet. Just visit your appliance page and start testdrive from your browser. Just enable testdrive networking and connect to your appliance:

Download

Your appliance is working flawlessly. Download it and deploy it wherever you want.

dister download

Current status

As you can see dister handles pretty fine a simple Rails application, but there's still room for improvements. Here's a small list of the things on my TODO list:

The dependency management should install gems using rpm packages. This would make the installation of native gems easier, right now the user has to manually add all the development libraries required by the gem. Moreover it would reduce the size of the overlay files uploaded to SUSE Studio.
SUSE Studio Testdrive should be supported.
It should be possible to deploy the SUSE Studio directly to EC2.
Fix bugs!

Bugs and enhancements are going to be tracked here.

Contribute

Dister code can be found here on github, fork it and start contributing. If you are a student you can work on dister during the next Google Summer of code, apply now!

Branched Appliance Development

noreply@blogger.com (James Mason) — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:08:00 +0000

We've recently introduced a new beta feature, allowing you to clone a specific version of one of your appliances to a new appliance; effectively creating a branch. This feature is at the heart of any strategy beyond rudimentary mainline development.

The following is an example of how the current Studio feature set can be used for a release-oriented branching strategy.

Lets assume an appliance, MyAppliance, which I intend to develop over a long term using my own milestones, and share on SUSE Gallery. I also intend to offer updates with bugfixes on each milestone release.

I will develop on MyAppliance, treating it as a mainline branch. When I reach my version 1 milestone, instead of immediately sharing that build to the Gallery, I will clone that version to a new appliance: MyAppliance 1.0, perform a build without making any changes, and share that build. In the Gallery, it will appear as "MyAppliance 1.0" with one shared build: version 1.0.0.

While v1.0 is out in the wild, I can return to my mainline branch, MyAppliance, and continue development towards my next milestone. When (not if... but when) a bug is reported on my 1.0 release, I can switch over to that branch (appliance MyAppliance 1.0) and work through to a fix. When I'm satisfied with the quality of the fix, I can release an update on that branch, sharing the build to the Gallery. In the Gallery, I will now have "MyAppliance 1.0" with two builds: the default (1.1.0) and a prior build (1.0.0).

The bug that was fixed in "MyAppliance 1.0" probably exists on my mainline branch as well. Unfortunately, Studio doesn't (yet) have diff/merge functionality, but I can view the configurations, and the changelogs, and determine exactly what needs to be done to resolve the issue on my mainline branch as well. If I have already made any other milestone branches ("MyAppliance 2.0" in the diagram), I should manually apply the update to those branches as well.

This process mirrors common behavior for projects of nearly any scale; you can adjust to your workflow simply by changing the point at which you branch. Two other common options are branching at the beginning of a version cycle (alpha branching) or when a milestone is feature-complete (beta branching).

New Beta Features: Revision Management 101

noreply@blogger.com (James Mason) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:33:00 +0000

We've been working on ways to make collaboration on SUSE Studio appliances easier. The first step down that road is to make your appliance's build history act live a revision control system. To that end, our beta users will find a few new features available to them: viewing an appliance's complete configuration on one page; the opportunity to branch an appliance by cloning a specific version; and a dynamically generated changelog between each version.

All of these features are available on the Build tab, linked under each version's header:

The Changelog gives you a bulleted list of the delta between the selected version and the prior version.

We've also added a link to it under the 'current' version, so you can see the changes you've made since your last build. One caveat here: the changelog takes a few seconds to generate (we do it in the background normally to save you the wait, but that won't work for the current version) so please be patient when you click the link.

Next up is the Configuration, which sums up all the settings on your appliance in one view - no tabbing necessary, just a bit of scrolling ;-)

And lastly (for now) is version cloning, which provides you new opportunities to branch and manage your appliance's lifecycle, but we'll talk more about that in another post. Keep in mind, cloning a version will copy all the configuration options from that version to a new appliance, but you will still be updating any selected software to the current versions.

Please remember, these are beta features. If you're not participating in our beta program, you won't see them at all. If you are in our beta program, please give us some feedback on the new features so we can get them just right!