Euler OS - Huawei Enterprise Linux

I've seen during this years that Huawei has grown a lot in the DataCenter and the Cloud sector, promoving different types of technologies like OpenStack, Software Defined Networks (SDN) and the Internet of things (IoT).  From a previous post about cloud technologies, I was redirected to the Huawei Development Network.

I decided to create an account and take a look of the products and technologies offered, once I logged in I started to explorer and I found an interesting project, called Euler OS.

This is a fork of a Centos distribution, planned to be used as a Server OS, for the Huawei line of servers. More details about the OS, can be found here.

I didn't see so much info about this distro from Google, besides Huawei standard documentation, so I decided to write about it (installation, first impressions, etc).

1. DOWNLOADING ISO IMAGE

This part of the process was kind of funny because I tried to download the image several times, using different methods (web browsers like chrome, firefox, opera) and even using wget and failed in all of them. For some reason when I was trying to download the iso file, I was always getting stuck at 1.2 GB and then was receiving a network connection warning or download abort error.

The main issue is that I was able to download information from several sites, including other Linux ISOS, without any issue, so I assumed that something was going on from Huawei's side.
The download page can be found here.

After this event I decided to open a ticket (pretty straightforward and simple from Huawei Development Network page, nice job !), then it took like 4 business days when I received some feedback from support team, they asked me to test with another link, to try download the file.

The second link was the lucky one, so I was able to download the file (4.1 GB approx). I choose in my case the EulerOS-V2.0SP2-x86_64-dvd-RC1 ISO.

2. OS INSTALLATION

If you have installed Centos in the past, the experience should be the same, the same installer (Anaconda) and basically the same steps of a standard Centos 7.X installation. For testing purpose I will use my good old friend VirtualBox.

You can see here some screenshots, for the installation

The OS only has support for English and Chinese language.

From the security perspective, I can see that there're different options that can be chosen:

In my case, I choose the default profile and also the base installation, without the GUI option

I choose automated partitioning, the path of my virtual disk and I started the OS installation. I also defined the user and root account as usual.

The installation takes a couple of minutes and I can log in now, to my Euler box.

ssh rmondion@192.168.1.16
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.16' (ECDSA) to the list of known hosts.
rmondion@192.168.1.16's password:
Last login: Thu Nov  2 23:37:35 2017

Authorized users only. All activities may be monitored and reported.
[rmondion@eulerOS ~]$
[rmondion@eulerOS etc]$ more /etc/system-release
EulerOS release 2.0 (SP2)

3. OS REVIEW

We can see some things from this distro

[rmondion@eulerOS etc]$ uname -r

3.10.0-327.53.58.73.h2.x86_64

[rmondion@eulerOS etc]$ more /etc/euleros-latest 

eulerversion=EulerOS_2.2.RC3

compiletime=2017-06-27-22-06-13

kernelversion=3.10.0-327.53.58.73.h2

We can see an updated Kernel and also their package repositories

[rmondion@eulerOS etc]$ cd /etc/yum.repos.d/

[rmondion@eulerOS yum.repos.d]$ ls

EulerOS-base.repo

[rmondion@eulerOS yum.repos.d]$ more EulerOS-base.repo 

[EulerOS-base]

name=EulerOS-base

baseurl=http://developer.huawei.com/ict/site-euleros/euleros/repo/yum/2.2/os/x86

_64/

enabled=1

gpgcheck=1

gpgkey=http://developer.huawei.com/ict/site-euleros/euleros/repo/yum/2.2/os/RPM-

GPG-KEY-EulerOS

We can search for standard software from our  Euler repository

[rmondion@eulerOS ~]$ yum search wget

EulerOS-base                                             | 4.2 kB     00:01    

(1/3): EulerOS-base/group_gz                               |  15 kB   00:06    

(2/3): EulerOS-base/updateinfo                             |  56 kB   00:09    

(3/3): EulerOS-base/primary_db                             |  12 MB   01:59    

============================== N/S matched: wget ===============================

wget.i686 : A utility for retrieving files using the HTTP or FTP protocols

wget.x86_64 : A utility for retrieving files using the HTTP or FTP protocols

[rmondion@eulerOS ~]$ yum search docker
============================= N/S matched: docker ==============================
docker-compose.noarch : add compose tool
docker-engine.x86_64 : The open-source application container engine
docker-engine-selinux.noarch : SELinux Policies for the open-source application
                             : container engine

[rmondion@eulerOS ~]$ yum search lxc
=============================== N/S matched: lxc ===============================
libvirt-daemon-driver-lxc.x86_64 : LXC driver plugin for the libvirtd daemon

Basically, we can see the same type of usage, from a Centos/Red Hat distribution.

4. CONCLUSIONS

- I think Huawei is having a great relationship with the Opensource community, contributing in many projects, especially in areas like SDN, OpenStack and now server OS, like Euler.

- If you are having some issues downloading the ISO image, you can follow the link mentioned before or try with the Huawei Chinese site.

- It's good to know that Centos is supported in the Huawei line of servers, sharing some space with the well known players (Red Hat, Suse Enterprise and Windows Server ).

5. ADDITIONAL LINKS

- Huawei Server OS Installation Guides

Thanks for visiting !!

Cheers

Rodolfo