No posts in June

Will be back with new postings in July. Have fun with containers running Linux on z Systems.

Public base images

https://registry.hub.docker.com/search?q=s390x shows base images available on Docker's public registry. Simply "docker pull <image>" to download them.
If you need to use a proxy, you can set the environment variable http_proxy (set it to http://proxy-address:port/) when starting the docker daemon.

Docker 1.6.0 builds for Linux on z Systems

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/docker.html has been updated and contains links to binaries of the new 1.6.0 version of Docker.
Installation/updates are simple: copy the binary into /usr/local/bin or a preferred location in your $PATH.

Drilling Holes Into Containers

Container management software is often deployed in containers itself. But how can code running inside a container look at other containers? Let's have a look how components like cAdvisor and datadog agents can gather that sort of data.

Windows Containers in Linux on s390x

Some experimentation really made it work:

New Docker binaries available for Linux on z Systems

There are new Docker binaries available for Linux on z Systems, fixing a segmentation fault. Check out http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/docker.html. Replacing is simple: extract the archive and copy the binary over your old one. Please make sure you are on a recent devicemapper level.

Creating Base Images

In First Steps with Docker, we have used a fairly crude way to create initial base images. A minimalistic approach to come to a base image environment is to have only the necessary rpms installed through on-board tools. This assumes the system is enabled for accessing all packages online.

Inspired from https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/contrib/mkimage-yum.sh, this script works both for SLES 12 and RHEL 7: