[SRU] Ceph Squid release

[James Page]

TBC

[Rgpublic (rgpublic)]

Existing Ceph nodes on Ubuntu 23.10 cannot be upgraded due to the broken Ceph version currently in Noble:

https://tracker.ceph.com/issues/64440

It seems this was fixed at the end of March, but the GIT version in Noble is from March 1st. Considering that the support for Mantic is running out soon and there's no release of Ceph Reef for Noble that leaves all Ceph users in very dire straits, unfortunately. I don't know why it was decided to deliver a broken Ceph version with an LTS release, but at least please consider publishing another more recent in-between release so users have a decent upgrade path for now.

[James Page (james-page)]

@rgpublic the decision to target squid was made after discussion with the upstream Ceph project however the RC (which is now out) and subsequent release have taken long to appear than originally planned for.

We should have the RC into a PPA for testing in the next two weeks.

[Rgpublic (rgpublic)]

@james-page: I see. Thanks a lot for the update. Very reassuring to have at least a ballpark timeframe. We're obviously waiting very anxiously, because Mantic support is running out on July 11th.

[James Page (james-page)]

@rgpublic the short support periods of the non-LTS releases does make this
challenging which is why most production deployments use a LTS release - we
provide a fully supported Ceph Reef via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for
OpenStack Bobcat which can be used on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 5:35 PM Rgpublic <email address hidden> wrote:

> @james-page: I see. Thanks a lot for the update. Very reassuring to have
> at least a ballpark timeframe. We're obviously waiting very anxiously,
> because Mantic support is running out on July 11th.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
> OpenStack, which is subscribed to ceph in Ubuntu.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2065515
>
> Title:
> [SRU] Ceph Squid release
>
> Status in ceph package in Ubuntu:
> Triaged
> Status in ceph source package in Noble:
> Triaged
> Status in ceph source package in Oracular:
> Triaged
>
> Bug description:
> TBC
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ceph/+bug/2065515/+subscriptions
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[James Page (james-page)]

RC tarball: https://download.ceph.com/tarballs/ceph_19.1.0.orig.tar.gz

[Rgpublic (rgpublic)]

@james-page: Thanks! I see where you're coming from. Just let me point out: I understand that Ceph is targeting for the most part rather huge installations where Ceph is running on its own servers or in a Docker container and that's what the Ceph folks suggest to use. And I certainly understand that that's the more "exicting" part of Ceph's abilities. Development-wise as well as business-wise. And it's amazing that Ceph is able to run on such huge installations. And while it certainly is more efficient to run Ceph like that, please don't forget us SMEs completely.

For us, every single rather miniscule complexity that's added means more costs. For us, running Ceph and the web services on just two nodes, connected via crosslink means: A very efficient and comfortable way to have a small server but still have failover. Fact is: Nothing comes even close to the performance, stability and reliability of Ceph for that. No Gluster, no NFS - nothing. And when everything is on one the same server, we often need to be able to use a recent ubuntu version Apache, PHP etc. Ceph packages are in fact available on Ubuntu Mantic and you allow a do-release-upgrade on 23.04 even with Ceph packages installed.

So this is obviously not sth. Canonical totally blocks. And over the years, this worked just perfectly. The problem arose when there were buggy GIT packages delivered with the Update without any warning - crashing the installation. I *almost* got the Reef packages running on Noble by using lots of APT-ignores but eventually failed only with the MGR service due to Python dependency hell. So, I guess the whole problem could have been easily avoided if you just provided Reef packages for 24.04 until the Squid packages arrive. I might be wrong, but I assume the infrastructure to create these packages should be there. I'm a developer myself, though, so I understand that things sometimes just don't run as planned. So, "no front", just wanted to add another perspective on this issue.