Customers are using complex storage stacks such as LVM over dm-crypt over MD RAID over multipath over iSCSI and FC with LOTs of LUNs, and we're facing problems in that area which are usually very hard to reproduce. It's also hard to guard against regressions. Being able to quickly and reliably set up VMs with various types of storage / multipath is a key part of testing multipath. It's doable, but cumbersome and has a steep learning curve. I want to create easy-to-understand manual recipes plus scripts that are both easy to understand / customize and deploy.

Hackweek 18 Update

What Has Been Done During HackWeek 18

Try to get back an automatic email notification about new or changed SAP Notes. Since SAP has closed down some of their internal servers, which hosted an unofficial database/API to the SAP Notes, the nice email notification service of the SAP LinuxLab is terminated.

There seems to be an overall consensus that the ioctl interface used by ethtool is a poor design as it's inflexible, error prone and notoriously hard to extend. It should clearly be replaced by netlink and obsoleted. Unfortunately not much actual work has been done in that direction until this project started. The project started in Hackweek 16 (fall 2017) and has been worked on since, both in Hackweek 17-19 and outside. First two parts of kernel implementation are in mainline since 5.6-rc1, first part of userspace implementation (ethtool utility) has been submitted to upstream at the end of Hackweek 19 (2020-02-16).

2019

I promised to start this project way earlier, but I think Hackweek will be a great time to make a start. The project once was called $BABELFISH, later "Rumsfeld", to honor the creator of the "Unknown unknowns" meme, now it's name is Maxfeld.

There are a couple of interesting initiatives that make the openSUSE project interesting for SMB, such as

The Invis Server