Last week Thomas Hampel and myself did the first part of a remote hands-on workshop. Each participants is sitting @home on their own computer. Last year at the DNUG workshop we had everyone install their Linux server on their notebook on the VM product of their choice. That was a bigger challenge that we thought. I prepared a whole server with local lab network with CentOS mirror, Docker registry, DNS, local clone of Docker documentation, own Git server, it took still quite a while to have everyone up and running. Standardized hosted infrastructure in the cloud I had that idea a while ago and last weekend I finally took the time to write it up for this workshop. It took some time, but this will not be the last workshop where we are using it. For sure we will have more workshops and make that concept available for others like DNUG here in Germany.

Beside some important JVM out of memory fixes and room reservation support for ESA 16.x with Apple calendar, there is one more big new thing! Support for MySQL !! This is big news for many customers. Today the DB2 license is still bundled with the Traveler HA license. This is still covered by an agreement with IBM. But this support will end as some point and if a customer uses DB2 just for Traveler HA, this might be overkill..

Wow I almost missed that. I spoke with a friend who mentioned it today. I did know about all the discussions for certificate life time. But I missed the official statements. So basically we cuts the time by 50%. Before the mangic number was 825 days. Now it will be reduced to 398 day! For everyone running Let's Encrypt certs today, this will not a big deal, because they have a 90 days lifetime anyway and you automatically renew them. For everyone else without certificate management in place, this will be a big deal!

As posted earlier it isn't that easy to get the current Docker 19 version installed on CentOS 8, because RedHat is shipping an older containerd.io with CentOS 8 than on CentOS7. Podman (https://podman.io/getting-started/) becomes more and more interesting and also since a couple of releases supports integration with K8s / OpenShift. It's no secret that RedHat is in favor of Podman. They don't ship the latest version. And Podman recommends using the one shipped with CentOS 8 -- currently 1.6.4.