The scheduled maintenance of rBuilder Online is now complete. The main changes are to the rPath Management Console. What's that?

The rPath Management Console

What we used to call rBuilder Catalog for EC2™ has expanded far beyond the role of a simple catalog, so we renamed it the rPath Management Console. Don't worry, it still supports Amazon EC2! But in the next new major version of rBuilder Appliance, it will support several other targets, both clouds and virtual infrastructure services.

In this release, we have updated it with a number of bug fixes. Most noticeably, the page now resizes to the maximum width of your browser, which makes it more readable and usable. We've also changed the RUNNING grouping to now say INSTANCES, to clarify the nature of the resources you see under this group. (For virtual infrastructure targets in particular, it is certainly common to have instances that are currently stopped, but could be restarted; these stopped instances make sense to list under INSTANCES but make not sense under RUNNING.)

Under the hood, many operations are now faster.

CentOS Platform

Several bugs have been fixed in the CentOS platform that was recently added to rBuilder Online. One is still outstanding; to build CD/DVD ISO images for system installation (Appliance ISO or Installable ISO) you will need to edit advanced options when creating the image, and specify a custom anaconda template: centos.rpath.com@rpath:centos-5 This bug is expected to be resolved in the next rBuilder Online update.

Horizontal Layout Improvements

Do Your Part

Help us make rBuilder Online better. We welcome your feedback on the rBuilder Online forum. If you find any bugs, please file an issue.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

The maintenance originally scheduled for Wednesday, November 19th has been postponed to start Thursday, November 20th at 21:00 EST (-0500) and will end at 22:00. During this time, rBuilder Online and all rpath.org repositories will not be available. A message will be posted when the scheduled maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

rBuilder Online will undergo scheduled maintenance starting Wednesday November 19th at 21:00 EST (-0500) and ending at 22:00. During this time, rBuilder Online and all rpath.org repositories will not be available. A message will be posted when the scheduled maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

As a courtesy to rPath Linux 1 users, rPath would like to remind you that rPath Linux 1 general maintenance has come to an end. rPath Linux 2 was released on May 15, 2008. The six months of overlapping general maintenance is complete, so general maintenance for rPath Linux 1 ceased on November 15, 2008.

rPath continues to maintain rPath Appliance Platform Linux Service 1 (rLS 1) for rPath customers. This includes proactive security updates as well as software maintenance in response to issues raised by rPath's customers. The updates will be available for rLS 1 and for the elements of rPath Linux 1 that are required for rPath's customers to develop software for rLS 1.

rPath strongly encourages users to adopt rPath Linux 2 and the rPath Appliance Platform Linux Service 2 (rLS 2). In addition to being an overall technology refresh with new versions of included packages, rPath Linux 2 is specifically designed to be a platform on which to deploy your applications. Here are just a few of the enhancements you will find in rPath Linux 2:

• Smaller footprint: The recommended base software set in rPath Linux 2 is approximately half the size of that in rPath Linux 1, and the kernel is approximately a third smaller.
• Brandable Boot Splash: rPath Linux 2 implements a graphical boot process which is easy to customize. It does not require that your appliance include the X Window System, and thus uses very little disk space.
• Additional security mechanisms: Several additional runtime security measures have been added to most packages ("stack protector" and "FORTIFY_SOURCE") and are enabled by default.
• More robust system boot: The syslinux boot loader is now the default. This well-maintained boot loader is highly extensible, easily branded and can be automatically updated safely and reliably.
• Appliance Installer: This new option installs your appliance software on systems in only a few minutes, requiring less memory and completing more quickly than the earlier package-based installation mechanism.

These enhancements and others are now available in rPath Linux 2 and rLS 2. Take advantage of these new features now by building your appliances on top of the rPath Linux 2 or rLS2 platform.

Please contact your rPath representative with any questions you may have about this announcement. rPath is proud to bring you rPath Linux 2 and will gladly provide advice and assistance for your upgrade.

The components of rLS 1 and rLS 2 are listed at rPath Appliance Platform/Linux Service: Components

rMake 1.0.24 is a maintenance release.

• Recipes are now loaded in the worker as a command instead of in-line in the builder. (RMK-923)
• rMake can now optionally cache chroots for quicker builds when the same chroot environment is required. (RMK-202)

• The defaultBuildReqs setting has been cleared except for the rmake and rmake-chroot user troves to enable building against non-rPath Linux Platforms. (RMK-908)
• When updating the checkout after a trove built from that checkout has been committed, rMake no longer produces output stating that the checkout is already up to date when multiple flavors have been built. (CNY-3035)

• The imageList argument to rmakeClient.createImageJob() have been extended from the 3-tuple (troveSpec, imageType, imageOptions) to the 4-tuple (troveSpec, imageType, imageOptions, buildName) which can later be extended with additional information if necessary. (RMK-907)

• The rmake.1 man page no longer gives wrong instructions for accessing archived chroots.
• Image builds utilizing rBuilder Online now use the proper URI for XMLRPC operations. (RMK-897)
• Groups are no longer marked as pre-built. (RMK-903)
• rMake will now properly handle cooking recipes not in the current working directory. (RMK-906)
• rMake will now correctly build multiple images in rBuilder that share a common name, version, flavor. (RMK-907)
• rMake will now correctly use the build name instead of the product name when building images in rBuilder. (RMK-927)

Conary 2.0.29 is a maintenance release.

• cvc diff now optionally takes a set of files to diff. Note that providing a revision now requires the --revision argument, to differentiate revisions from files. (CNY-2384)
• Added --build-log and --show-file parameters to conary rq. (CNY-2584)
• Group, Fileset, and Redirect recipes now check and record build requirements. (CNY-3016)

• Support for obtaining changeset fingerprints has been added to the network repository client.
• Transient files whose contents have changed will be restored if the file had been previously removed from the local system (CNY-2987)
• generateStatus() call didn't handle a root parameter properly. This didn't cause cvc problems, but didn't work properly within rbuild (CNY-3026).

• Code using a shim client can now more securely "imitate" a user by passing in a ValidPasswordToken object in lieu of the actual password. (CNY-2968)
• Writing files into the content store now decompresses and validates the sha1 once instead of once per content store. Additionally, file creation and the sha1 computation are now done in C instead of python.
• Significantly reduced the number of SQL queries used to commit groups to repositories for a noticeable improvement in commit performance.
• Temporary tables for commits of collection and files are merged into the final tables at the end of the changeset commit instead of incrementally following each trove.
• The original client IP is now used for logging and authentication when a request is received from a HTTP proxy. (CNY-3006)

• ABI dependencies are no longer checked on erase. (CNY-2991)
• createSourceTrove now honors filestreams marked as config. (CNY-3011)
• Subscribing to log messages now works with a system time that requires more than 10 characters to represent the seconds (after Saturday November 20 2286 17:46:39 UTC). (CNY-3019)
• Committing now works through restrictive proxies. (CNY-3032)
• A bug that manifested itself as a TroveNotFound when accessing multiple repositories through the same url has been fixed. (CNY-3027)
• A bug that caused conary to segfault while creating changesets under python 2.6 has been fixed. (CNY-3033)
• An API method nologUpdateSrc has been added, which raises exceptions instead of returning None to indicate failure as the old updateSrc method did. (CNY-3035)

The scheduled maintenance of rBuilder Online is now complete.

Launching Multiple Images in rBuilder Catalog for EC2™

The rBuilder Catalog for EC2™ now supports launching multiple images with a single click of the "Launch" button.

To launch multiple images simultaneously, select multiple images in the catalog and then click "Launch". Each image's launch settings may be individually customized or loaded from a saved launch context prior to launching.

Do Your Part

Help us make rBuilder Online better. We welcome your feedback on the rBuilder Online forum. If you find any bugs, please file an issue.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

rBuilder Online will undergo scheduled maintenance starting Wednesday November 5th at 21:00 EDT (-0400) and ending at 22:00. During this time, rBuilder Online and all rpath.org repositories will not be available. A message will be posted when the scheduled maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.