About Me

I am Arif Ali, a Staff Support Engineer at Canonical's supporting a specific customer, I work on sosreport at work as well as my spare time. I have a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics as well as a MSC in Advanced topics in Computer Science.

Before joining Canonical in 2019, I worked in the HPC industry deploying, architect, designing and supporting systems across many industries including Motorsport, Aerospace, Automotive and Research.

I have been using Linux since 1999 with various distributions, with the earliest being Mandrake Linux, with Fedora Core 1 being the first official distro for work Laptop in 2003. Which you can imagine had several issues to actually get working. Over the years I delved into Debian, CentOS, Red Hat and Ubuntu, interchanging based on experiences and requirements.

Contact Information

Contributions

When it comes to open source contributions, there are a few in my time, and some of these are listed below

xCAT

As part of my employment with OCF, i was introduced to a project called xCAT which is a product that allows you to deploy bare-metal machines across ,any racks of servers.

The main support for xCAT was RPM bases, i.e. RedHat, CentOS, SLES and Fedora. There was no support for Ubuntu.

In my spare time I worked on solve the Debian/Ubuntu story, and added the feature to be able to deploy using xCAT. Below is a link to a video of a successful deployment of a stateless Ubuntu 9.10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLaa3EyEOJM

Furthermore, I built the initial Ubuntu packages for xCAT in-line to how the project was creating the RPM packages

My main contribution for this is in he commit below.

https://github.com/xcat2/xcat-core/commit/5bda5a1df69238756e750b8eb1ad33cfb782eb00

There were many more features and bug-fixes that were implemented and the list would be too long to list here, these are easily visible in https://github.com/xcat2/xcat-core

Android

During a period of 3 years, I had the HTC HD2 and was getting sick of the Windows OS on the phone itself. This encouraged me to look at the forums, and found a way to get Android working on the platform. The first part of yhe learning curve was to actually get it working and deploying on the phone.

Contributions wise, I was packing 2 ROMs in the early stages to allow for myself first and then make it available to the community to use.

While using one of the more open-source implementations of the ROMS CyanogenMod the maintainer left, and no new ROMs

I took over the project, and was the device maintainer for 18 months. The device tree, the binaries were made public, and with 100% open-source ethos.

The main idea from my side was to make the device tree more in-line with other Android devices so that automation and maintainer story was a lot easier.

• Device Tree: https://github.com/cmhtcleo/android_device_htc_leo

• Vendor Blobs: https://github.com/cmhtcleo/android_vendor_htc_leo

OpenStack

I have used Openstack in my previous role as well as my current role. I used Havana, Juno and Kilo in my previous role, where we developed many salt stack formulas to deploy Openstack, albeit these were all in-house developments.

I started to work on Contributions to the salt-formula-X projects in opendev, but eventually the project was abandoned.

In my current role I have used Queens, Ussuri and Yoga, where I have working knowledge of deployment and support.

Over the years as part of my clos relationship with customers I have been able to fix bugs and create features in the OpenStack Charms, and all of my contributions are listed above in Gerrit.

As a side thing, I also have a small git repo where i have various docs from historical lab environments as well as some heat templates that I use regularly for customer testing or verification

Ubuntu HPC

With my experience in HPC from my first employment, I have been involved in various discussions the past and present on various aspects of HPC within Canonical.

I attend the weekly community meetings that the Ubuntu HPC team hold, and occasionally report back on any of the work they have been doing.

Every now and again, I personally go to te HPC conference in the UK to promote Ubuntu with he community to hopefully get more people coming towards Ubuntu for HPC.

snapcraft

Since joining canonical in 2019, I was fascinated by snaps especially after creating a simple hello world snap as part of onboarding. Since then, I have been able to pick up the sosreport snap and worked on trying to strictly confine with not much luck, and then it was agreed to be classically confined.

I have since then uploaded 2 unofficial snaps, primarily as these 2 applications I was using heavily in my local environments

1. sshuttle
2. apt-mirror

There was then a call on snapcrafters to get more people involved, so I worked on the mutt snap, and got into a state that is based on the latest guidelines. Now it has automatically pushed 2 revisions of mutt with little involvement. I also updated the snap to work with core24

sosreport

My main open source project that I work on currently os sos which is a tool that allows a user to grab diagnostic data from a machine or a set of machines for support personnel to then debug any of the corresponding issues.

I have been extensively been working on the project since April 2023 I have the been one of the upstream core Maintainer since November 2024. I did some work in 2020 and 2021, but major upstream work only started in August 20222. Some of the major pieces of work are listed below

Testing and Releases

• Create a new snap for sosreport, it is classic confined snap

• Automate build of snap in GH workflows and publish to latest/edge

• Automate build of snap and publish releases to latest/candidate

• Automate build and test all stable Ubuntu releases in CI
• Automate build and testing of deb package
• Testing framework improvements including current Ubuntu in dev

Major peices of Work

• Added various plugins for the benefit of Ubuntu and Debian users
• Update the Debian policy to add all the revisions

• Added snap package manager (link)

• Updated ubuntu plugin so that we can now use pro commands

• Plugins updated for ubuntu detection
  • alternatives
  • selinux
  • grafana snap enablement
  • omnipath
• Plugin additions
  • vault
  • slurm
  • sunbeam

Direct Ubuntu Work

The Support Engineering typically requires sos report collection from systems for debugging purposes and hence having someone with in-depth knowledge to help us to move the Ubuntu specifics is extremely important, so working on SRUs and helping with verification is also very important. This is where I come in again and work on uploading sosreport for all the stable supported distros in Ubuntu and Debian.

Below you can see the sponsorships for the work I have done since May 2024

• Ubuntu Sponorships

• Debian Sponsorships

Future Goals

There are so many things I like to get involved in the future. Key items listed below

Ubuntu HPC

Get more involved with the team and look at the work that is being done and mak some contributions to the documentation or charm work that is being done.

snapcraft

Would like to get more involved in building and maintaining more snaps apart from the ones I am managing currently.

sosreport

As the key component of open-source work that I do, I want to make sos report the best it can be for the Ubuntu platform, which means we are able to integrate anything that Ubuntu comes uo with and be able to consume those applications and products.

Furthermore, continue the work upstream, building the Ubuntu and Debian packages as well as the snap.

Links

• arif-ali/sosreportPerPackageUploadApplication

Testimonials

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