mmcgrath

Search the wiki

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:35:38 GMT

Ian Weller submitted a ticket not long ago for a simple symlink. Its finally done and you can now add the FedoraProject wiki search to your FireFox Browser

When browsing the wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ You'll notice the search bar on the right and the fav icon turn blue. When that happens you can click on the search dropdown and add Fedora Project to your list. Done!

Announcements from FUDCon

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:21:59 GMT

I am extremely pleased to bring two announcements from FUDCon. This won't be much of a surprise to some of you (seeing as we're completely transparent and release early and often) but for those of you that aren't on the Infrastructure team here goes.

1) The Fedora Accounts System is now an OpenID provider. We're still working on different consumer applications, expect the wiki to support it soon. But now, for example, you can log in to sites like http://livejournal.com/ with your FAS OpenID. Just type in "http://username.id.fedoraproject.org/" in my case its "http://mmcgrath.id.fedoraproject.org/" We're still working on testing it with other OpenID websites but please report bugs to us at https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/

2) The Fedora Telephony system (Fedora Talk) is now ready! Any users who have signed the CLA can log in to the accounts system (https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/) and enable Asterisk via the VOIP link. Its our first Account system plugin :) This is a major undertaking for us as all of the hosting and bandwidth has been donated by ServerBeach. The dial in numbers have been provided by ArrivalTelecom and DiDDiscount.

Presently we have five dial-in numbers available, four in the US and one in the UK. We're still working on adding features such as town-hall style meetings (people dialing in to talk as well as being able to listen via a web interface) and a more feature-rich conferencing system. Voice mail also works so if you enable asterisk and someone calls you, don't be surprised if you get a voice message when you're not around.

See http://talk.fedoraproject.org/ for more information.

I'd also like to thank Jared Smith, Jeff Ollie, Dennis Gilmore, Ignacio Vazquez, and Ricky Zhou for their key contributions in this project.

Rock Lobster

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 04:49:22 GMT

Warning from this evenings events: If you are a member of a dueling pianos group, and you don't know Rock Lobster... I will make you pay... oh yes, I will make you pay.

Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:11:09 GMT

And I quote (from around minute marker 23)
"Canonical had 6 changes in the past 5 years, Canonical does not give back to the community."

http://youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw

Canonical: Why bother with vision when others have it :)

Seth is right

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:07:43 GMT

Seth is right. - http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/planet-issues/

I think the barriers to being on fedora planet are pretty low. The core question is whether or not being listed here is a privilege or a right. If you think you 'deserve' to be on Fedora planet... but aren't in at least ONE group in FAS you're sadly mistaken.

2 cents.

Dear TSA

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:32:03 GMT

When you stopped me in the airport because my toothpaste was too "big" and went through every pocket you could... my wedding ring fell out and you don't know where it is. Neither do I. Since you cannot tell the difference between toothpaste and explosives, I'm positive you'll never find it. I hate what this country has become.

How to get involved

Thu, 29 May 2008 03:49:44 GMT

So, before this whole wiki thing happened I really didn't know ianweller. I had very little interaction with the arts team (where he lurked quite a bit) So I sent this email:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-March/msg00100.html

One of the responses...

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2008-March/msg00108.html

And it was as easy as that. Shortly after that Ian and I worked together almost every week after that and in the last month or so almost every day. And that's what community is all about. I wrote this post to thank Ian for being our local mediawiki expert. He made things infinitly easier when I could just say "hey, how do you..." and just get an answer.

I'd encourage EVERYONE to do something similar. Lurk on fedora-devel or another list and when someone says something that you have expertise in. Offer to help.... And keep offering. Sometimes something as simple as "so if there's anything I can do to help, holler" makes all the difference in the world.

Account System Woes

Tue, 27 May 2008 19:17:34 GMT

The account system has a problem and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. Take a look at this (all too common) work flow.

1) A big push towards http://join.fedoraproject.org/ has brought people to sign up for accounts
2) Jonny signs up for an account at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
3) Jonny signs the CLA
4) Jonny signs up to be an admin of the account system

Huh?

Sometimes 4) is "Jonny signs up to be on the infrastructure team" or "Jonny signs up to be on the websites team". Then nothing happens. We don't hear from the user, they don't introduce themselves. They just sit at the application request.

The problem is people sign up for an account, then start signing up for groups thinking that's where they should start when, in almost every team I can think of, it's the last place they should go. The first is to IRC, mailing lists or just someone in the group.

How do we get that point across to people? Even if they do apply first, too many of them just stop there and it has to be a bad experience for them. Finding sponsors is hard enough now, trying to get sponsors to contact each of these people and follow up and stuff just won't work in a volunteer environment.

Fedora's Market

Thu, 22 May 2008 18:19:18 GMT

In response to Karsten's post - http://iquaid.org/2008/05/21/is-fedora-for-newbies/

Last year I posted a similar question to the Fedora Advisory Board - http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2007-July/msg00137.html but got no real answer out of it. So here's what I'd propose:

Fedora changes the world so that others may live in it.

Fedora is a lot of things to a lot of people. The recent xorg thread on fedora-devel was painful but the fact is anyone complaining that Fedora doesn't support nvidia is just in the wrong spot. But again, Fedora's goals are very clear in regards to open source software. We may not have met those goals yet, but we're working on them.

I've always seen Fedora as sort of a laboratory where really cool stuff happens. Thats primarly why I got involved. As someone who works full time for Fedora I spend very very little time on the operating system itself. Instead I play a support role. One thing thats nice about that is I get to see the process happen. Fedora (the project) a great place where very cool stuff happens. It's unique in that respect and I think that fact gets overlooked quite a bit.

Ask yourself, as I do, does this - http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9950150-16.html sound like a noob OS? I don't think so. But does that mean noobs can't use it? No. Unfortunately the term "Noob" gets argued like its just one type of person and thats just not the case. I think plenty of noobs come to Fedora and it is a very successful operating system for them. No one can make an OS for everyone so the question remains. Who is Fedora for?

Perhaps Fedora the OS is a byproduct of Fedora the Project. We're all here to change the world and our vehical is Open Source. We're making the whole field better by being early adopters and taking the risks we take. The Fedora Project is about changing the world, Fedora the OS is just how we're going to do it

Warning! Warning! New Wiki Coming!

Wed, 14 May 2008 02:25:36 GMT

I love my job. I do. But sometimes being the infrastructure team lead blows because you get stuck doing the stuff no one in their right mind will volunteer for. It also means getting stuck taking the blame for stuff that goes wrong. This is one of those times. We've come a long way from:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-December/msg00802.html

to:

https://publictest1.fedoraproject.org/wiki/

But I'm still not totally happy with the conversion script. At this point though its putting in a lot of effort for minimal gain. The bottom line is Moin just isn't cutting it for us anymore. We're moving to mediawiki. There's a small SIG of various team leads thats been working on this with me. There's around 12,000 pages and over 4,000 attachments and currently thousands and thousands of users. Combine that with my mediocre python skills and publictest1 is what you're going to get!

So what can you do?

Go through the publictest1 page listed above (no editing yet, expect it soon though with OpenID + FAS support). Find things that don't look right. By that I mean look for things broken on many pages. If its just on your page or a couple, just fix the problem after the migration.

Lots of things are different in Mediawiki then Moin. Some of these differences are at the very core of why Moin is so unscalable. Become familiar with this page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/WikiMigration

If you have a concern contact your team lead listed on that page. If your team is not represented, sorry about that, please add yourself.

We're looking at deploying on the 20th or the 27th. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. This is going to involve pain for at least the couple of weeks after its deployed. If you have a ticket to file please do so here:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ ; PLEASE put the keyword "WIKI" in the ticket.

If you want to be 100% sure your issue will get fixed... submit a patch otherwise you might just be stuck fixing it after the migration.

http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedora-infrastruture.git/scripts/moin2mw/

Props goes out to ivazquez for unicode support and ianweller who has helped me become more familiar with mediawiki and continues to be a valuable asset in this conversion.

I beg you

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:33:31 GMT

Will someone (anyone) find a meeting time for the web team to meet. Put together an agenda, hold the meeting and put the notes up on the list.

Anyone can do this.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-websites-list/2008-April/msg00363.html

Just pick one!!!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:09:21 GMT

Dear kernel developers,

I love all of you. I do. But would you please all get together and pick a unit everyone can agree on? I mean come on:

/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centisecs

Who measures anything in centiseconds? really :)

Whats this meme stuff?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:01:11 GMT

Here's mine:

[mmcgrath@laptop ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
231 ssh
154 cd
148 ls
95 sudo
49 vi
40 alpine
29 git
24 ping
19 rpm
19 make

Just as I thought... basically nothing more then a terminal.

Please Help

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:40:26 GMT

We're working to migrate the wiki to mediawiki but as of yet very few people have actually stepped up and helped out. I really need some more python programmers and eyes here or this is going to be a huge failure for everyone (except for Infrastructure who actually runs the thing).

In particular we need help with:

Migration script
Attachments
Templates design
Plugin testing

Right now the site is up at:

https://publictest1.fedoraproject.org/wiki/

The ticket is at:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/31

If you're interested in helping please stop by #fedora-admin, tell us what skill set you have and what you're interested in doing.

Pycon was great

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:33:21 GMT

Tom, Luke, Toshio and I all went to pycon this last weekend. Luke and Toshio are still there doing sprints. I have to say it was a great setup. Facilities and snacks aside. Some of the talks were great. We went to a talk about writing custom trac plugins and I have to say, even though the default trac plugin is a bit sore on the eyes, those guys _really_ have their act together.

Toshio and Luke all got great ideas for Fedora and how to better utilize our code. The talk on Unicode alone was an amazing wakeup call for luke and I. needless to say, we've been doing it wrong. But no more. There was so much covered in such a short amount that I can't list them all here. Needless to say with as much as we use Python in our OS and in our Infrastructure I'd highly encourage anyone that can come, to come next year.

FAS2 ships!

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:23:13 GMT

Thanks to the hard work and efforts of Toshio and Ricky, FAS2 ships!

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/

I have to say, I've seen much larger teams with much larger budgets do much less work in twice the time. Its been a great project to work on with the two of them and I look forward to seeing how far we can take this new system. Its got lots of options built into it though many of them aren't available yet. Imagine being able to manage your asterisk mailbox password and list passwords all from one location. well thats what we're hoping for. But one step at a time. Enjoy!

Comcast and accountability

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:38:04 GMT

I'm in the middle of an internet outage right now and was forced to use my backup. I called comcast they said they already knew about the outage and were working to fix it. I asked for a credit to my account and they said I'd have to call back to get the credit after the outage was over.

Why aren't these credits automatically applied?

I've had a few bbb complaints in the past, almost always to cable companies. How can I (or we) hold them and other companies, more accountable for their actions?

FAS2 Testing Needed!

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:30:15 GMT

Well, we've been working on it for a long time and even with a last minute core technology change FAS2 is ready for testing and almost ready for deployment. What is FAS2 you ask? Its the second iteration of the Fedora Accounts System. It's based off of TurboGears and has so many standards and future expandability I won't even go into that here. What I will say is that we'd like everyone to come test it before we deploy it in the next week or two.

The test site is at: https://publictest10.fedoraproject.org/accounts/

This system is completely separate from the current running system so feel free to come in, setup a test account, or 2 or 10, and groups. If you'd like admin or sponsor access to a group just stop by #fedora-admin and ask for it and someone will set you up. What are features to look forward to in FAS2?

Online help system
Translations (the systems there but without translations currently)
JSON Interface
More comprehensive client for shell access
Easier to sign the CLA
OpenID interface (work in progress)
Much less developer-centeric interface

To get your own local install going just run:

yum install git-core
git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedora-infrastructure.git/
cd fedora-infrastructure.git/fas
vi README

If you have any bugs to report please send them to:
https://fedorahosted.org/fas2/

We're also taking feature requests though they will likely not make it into the initial deployment. Happy hacking!

We need some more help!

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:15:42 GMT

Alrighty everyone, so one thing we did recently was go out and get a new torrent server so we'd have plenty of space for all those spins. Well, as it turns out torrent is ill suited to distribute some content and we could really use another storage medium.

So what do I have in mind?

Just storage, served by ftp, http and rsync (acl's on rsync) to act as a primary mirror for Fedora's secondary content. What is secondary content you ask? Potentially plenty of stuff. A mirror for fedorahosted releases, video and training content, secondary archs, non-official or archived releases. Really there is quite a bit of stuff that we could be distributing (and should be!) that we just can't right now.

So what are the specs?

I'd like between 2T and 10T of actual storage hosted at your location.
Internet and Internet2 access
1 Gigabit or faster connection
The ability for fedora to push content
Some sort of acl system for rsync for other mirrors.

How do you get involved?

Email me! I'd love to talk more about this. mmcgrath@redhat.com This would be a huge help to us right now.

Smolt is about to break!

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:32:27 GMT

Smolt 1.1 is going to be in your repos very soon. The old client will not work with the new server. There's a lot of changes in this release. The biggest is the separation of public and private UUID's. They used to be the same thing but on more. Thanks to some of the work done by Yaakov this is a pretty easy thing to do. Basically the private UUID stays on your box and you, the user, never really uses it.

This is to put some of the basic groundwork for our ultra-secure smolt client side. There is a new option in the smolt config "secure". It doesn't do much now but in the future, with proper selinux, it will be possible for admins to secure smolt in a way that just has not been possible in the past allowing for a much more anonymous submission as well as preventing even users with local access to the system access to smolt.

Also there's a little bit of randomization being built into the new script. This will make smolt more reliable on sending. Look for more graphs and metrics on the next release (including being able to view all those ratings you all have been doing!)

When the new version comes out, run smoltSendProfile -a and make sure to go in and rate your profile!

How geeky are you?

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 03:29:32 GMT

So most computer geeks know why the date January 1st 1970 comes up a lot in dealing with software because of Unix epoch. And I can't claim to be geeky enough to answer this question without looking but I thought I'd challenge you and see how many people, if any, do actually know it without having to think about it or look it up....

What day of the week was January 1st 1970?

party like its 1969.

Remember when?

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 06:44:17 GMT

Remember when it used to be:

SRPM -> Plague -> RPM?

I remember that time.

Now its

SRPM -> Koji -> lots of outages since it's installation -> tons of new hardware (the majority of Fedora's Infrastructure cost) -> late night wake up alerts -> RPM

I had a knife on a plane 2 times this last week.

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:50:05 GMT

So yeah, an interesting thing happened when I tried to get home from Phoenix yesterday. I got pulled aside and asked "Sir, I'd like to search your bag but before I do, do you have any sharp objects in it?"

To which I replied "no"

Then, in an instant, my face probably looked very surprised.

"Actually, yes, yes I do have a sharp object in there"

I always stick my keys in my laptop bag before going through security. I had recently added a pocket knife to the key ring. So I told him that, he took it out and removed the knife and I went on my way.

Then I realized it would have been on the plane with me from MDW to RDU, and from RDU to PHX. Classic.

What a week!

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:21:06 GMT

Jan 9th: Arrive to Raleigh, head in to work for a little bit.
Jan 10th: Meetings, work, meetings
Jan 11th: Hackfest, didn't get anything done as usual. Had to help others, comes with the territory.
Jan 12th: FUDCon - Initial feelings of a cold (not the only one :-/) Gave two talks. One on the Infrastructure setup, one with Paul Frields about single sign on and lowering the barriers.
Jan 13th: Hackfest - Drove to the airport a lot to drop people off.
Jan 14th: Meetings, work, Meetings. Dinner at Seths, soup did the soul good. Still feeling sick.
Jan 15th: Work, Meetings Work, flew out to Phoenix instead of back home to Chicago. No more clean clothes at that point. Ate Glezos' chocolate for dinner.
Jan 16th: Head in to colo. Rack new disk tray and tape drive. Minor cable cleanup (there's only so much time).
Jan 17th: Verify all pdu labels, server labels, kvm labels, and cyclades go to the server they claim to. Fly home. Pass out for the night, hope to shake the cold.
Jan 18th: Sleeeeep
Jan 19th: Head to Iowa to visit old friend.

FUDCon was awesome as always. Its always exhausting but well well worth it.

Quick Shout Out

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:08:39 GMT

Got to love FUDCon. I come excited, leave exhausted and couldn't have had a better time. I had a chance to meet Ricky and Yaakov. I've been working with both for some time online now. Ricky has been doing some great things in Fedora Infrastructure and has been a valuable asset. Yaakov has been working with me on Smolt and has been taking very good care of things. Especially, more recently, helping fix some architectural issues that I did not foresee when I first started Smolt. Those guys rock :)