Happy New year everyone.

I thought I would do a quick post about apps/software that I use. Of course my requirements may be wildly different from your own, but perhaps you will see something here that you might want to also investigate, or in turn leeds you to something you do want to use.

On the server side, I want to use things that are open source and run on Fedora (my main server at home is Fedora of course). I prefer things packaged up and available in the main Fedora repos, but of course that is not practical for everything sadly.

• nextcloud: nextcloud continues to be a great solution for a lot of things due to it's library of plugins. I use it for files, uploading photos/videos (see below), organizing photos, recipies, calendar, contacts, deck lists (kanban) and more. It's not packaged (anymore) in Fedora, but it's pretty easy to install and upgrade on the fly. I've also been impressed lately that things like files are... files on the server, not some weird db format that are difficult to add/delete/refresh if you need to from the server side. I also do phone backups to nextcloud (see below)

• postfix/dovecot/opendkim/opendmark/spamassassin/sqlgrey/saslauthd for email. This seutp has worked for years and years and just works fine.

• znc for irc bouncer. I still connect to a number of IRC networks (although I am usually much more active on matrix).

• matrix-synapse for matrix server. I'm just using the packaged Fedora version and it works fine. Someday I will probibly move it to use one of the setups that has more bells and whistles but for now it's fine.

• postgres for database server for everything that needs one. I was running also a mariadb instance, but I moved the last things off it over the holidays and didn't setup one on the new server.

• miniflux for RSS. ( https://miniflux.app/ ). miniflux isn't packaged directly in Fedora, but the upstream folks provide a repo and rpms and they work just fine. This allows me to manage/read RSS feeds via web interface, or (usually) just manage/read via an app (see below).

• I was running calibre in headless server mode to serve ebooks but it's really vastly overkill to do that and it pulls in about 233 rpms which I otherwise do not need. So, I switched to a simple OPDS app: cops ( https://github.com/mikespub-org/seblucas-cops ) (well, a fork of it that works with recent php). It seems to do the job just fine. I can manage things with calibre on my laptop and rsync them to the server where cops serves them to my phone (or whatever reader I want).

On the Linux client side (my laptop):

• firefox as main web browser, occasionally having to use chrome or chromium. Mozilla hasn't been making good choices of late, and I really hope they find their way again, but I really really dislike the idea of using web browsers or engines that are made by super large companies for their own gain. I'll probibly stick with firefox until it becomes untenable. Perhaps servo will be ready by then?

• hexchat for IRC. Been using it for ages and ages.

• discord (flatpak app). I have some friends that I have known since college and we have a discord server to chit-chat on, so reluctantly I connect to that to keep in touch.

• necko for matrix. I use the Fedora packaged version and it's the best of the matrix clients most of the time. It still has flaws of course, but day to day it's the best one for me.

• newsflash (flatpak) for rss client reading. Newsflash used to be packaged in Fedora, but it just became too difficult, so I use the flatpak now. newflash looks great, works well, and is a very pleasent reading experence. It connects easily to miniflux (see above). Doing things that way allows me to read things on the laptop (Newsflash), web (miniflux) or phone (see below) and keep all of them in sync so I don't re-read things.

• foot for terminals. I've used... a lot of terminals over the years and almost all of them are just fine if needed, but I've really taken to foot over the last few years. It's super quick, it allows me to have italic fonts (call me crazy, but I find oblique/italic to be easier on my eyes and vte based terminals no longer allow that). I do use xfce4-terminal on Xfce, because of course foot is a wayland only terminal.

• calibre for ebook / library management. There's a number of new ebook library managers up and coming, but calibre is still far ahead of all of them in my opinion.

Finally on my phone (a google pixel 8a) running https://grapheneos.org/ Probibly too many apps to note, but ones that interact with my laptop and main server:

• firefox here as well. The mobile version has gotten much better over recent years. Sadly, installed from google play store.

• antennapod for podcasts.

• tusky ( https://tusky.app/ ) for mastadon reading/posting.

• librera ( https://tusky.app/ ) for ebook reading. While making this post I happened to see I had it installed from google play store, I think because in the distant past there was something that didn't work in the f-droid version, but no longer. I switched it over to the f-droid version and it's working fine. Its a nice reader, it hooks into odps on the server just fine. I've ready so many books with this thing.

• KISS launcher. I ran accross this a while back somewhere and it's still my main application launcher. It provides your apps as a searchable list, with the ones you use the most at the bottom so you can easily find them. This is so much nicer than paging though a bunch of virtual desktops looking for some icon. Highly recommended.

• Nextcloud android apps: nextcloud, deck, memories, cookbook all integrate nicely with nextcloud. Deck is nice for shopping lists or organizing things. The main nextcloud app lets you sync things back and forth and setup autosync. I have it syncing my photos and movies up right after I take them. Memories then lets you look at and organzie. cookbook is handy for using in the kitchen when you want to follow a recipe.

• Element X for matrix. Works fine, has the new 'fast' sync, which seems to work reasonably well.

• Paseo for step counting. I installed this last year and it's been nice be able to see that I need to get up and walk around more. It hooks into the android steps stuff so walking on the eliptical or the like will show up as steps even though you didn't go anywhere.

• A bunch of junk non free apps I need for various things sadly, but it's nice to have the option of installing from play store if you absoluetely need some app and can't avoid it.

Im sure there's more things I didn't remmeber or see while looking here but hopefully the list inspires you somehow.

I'm still figuring out comments to blog posts, but if you want to reply, I will be making a mastodon post pointing to this blog post you can reply to: https://fosstodon.org/@nirik/113766175760197132

Like many other folks, over holidays I like to read books, watch movies and tv shows, visit family, bake and eat too much food, drink too many good beers and ciders and meads, and catch up some on around the house projects.

Also, of course I like to catch up on my hacking on things. Often during the normal times I am busy at work and don't have the time or energy to play around with things, or just improve my home infrastructure ( queue up joke about the cobblers children never having new shoes).

So, I thought I would put together a recap of things I looked at/setup in case they inspire others.

There may well be a part two of this, but we will see how much more I get done before the holidays end.

• Got sound working again on my media PC via HDMI. Sadly, I didn't actually fix it so much as swapped a usbc doc with HDMI in for the frame.work HDMI module that was not working. I'm really not fully sure why it no longer lets me have sound, but I am suspecting a kernel/firmware issue. Might play with it again someday, but it all works fine now.

• Unpacked and setup the OpenWrt One (see previous blog post for a review). So far it's quite fast and working great.

• Installed a SNO (Single Node Openshift) in a vm to play with. Found that it's not covered under the Developer subscription (gives you a 60day trial). So decided to ponder more on what k8s thing I want to play with at home. Contenders: k3s, microshift, OKD of some flavor.

• Moved this blog from wordpress to nikola. I'm sure there's still rough edges, but overall it seems working. Spent longer on trying to get apache redirects working than importing and setting up nikola. (It was a ordering issue, there was a redirect that was basically overriding all the new ones I was trying to put in place).

• Cleaned up my restic backups as the partition was starting to get full.

• Updated my Nextcloud instance to 30.0. Added some new apps. The cookbook app is brilliant! You can (usually) just point it to a url and it will scrape the recipe in with all info, media and such. Really nice. The memories app is a nice improvement over the default photos app I think. Cleaned up old trashbin and versions of files that saved a bunch of space.

• Looked at my piwigo install. I replaced an old gallery2 instance a long time ago with this, but I haven't really done much with it in recent years. It's also the last app I have that uses mysql/mariadb. So, I imported all the files into nextcloud for now and I think I will retire piwigo. Nextcloud memories still isn't great for public sharing, but you can share albums with a public link.

• Decided it was time to move my main server over to a fresh install. It's working just fine, but /boot is only 185MB, so it can only hold 2 kernels which is anoying. It's also ext3 (yes, ext3!). The / fs is ext4, and I would like to get compression at least from btrfs. This vm was installed with f32 and upgraded to f41 with almost no issues. Did a f41 install and synced data over to it: 309GB becomes 189GB on the new vm. I'm still organizing and moving things. Probibly will cut over around new years with a hopefully short downtime.

• Got a calendar app on my phone and via the magic of DAVx managed to get my nextcloud calendar, my work google calendar and my home google calendar all syncing in one place. The fossify calendar is not too bad, installable via fdroid and seems reasonably active upstream.

Back to hacking on things and trying to relax some.

Recently the OpenWrt One was announced for sale. This is a wireless access point/router powered by Banana Pi and designed by the OpenWrt project. Additionally, $10 from every device sold go to the Software freedom conservency to help fund OpenWrt efforts.

The device was available on aliexpress, which is a bit weird for us here in the west, but I had no trouble ordering it there and the cost was pretty reasonable. It arrived last week.

The design is pretty nice. There's a NAND/NOR switch. Normal operation the switch is in NAND setting. If something goes wrong, you can hold down the button on the front while powering on and you shoule get a rescue image. If somehow even that image doesn't work, you can switch the switch to NOR mode and it will boot a full recovery from a USB drive. So, pretty unbrickable.

Initial setup was easy. Just screw on the 3 antenna, connect ethernet and usb-c power and everything came up fine. I was a bit confused on what password to use, but then I realized just hitting return would take me to the 'hey, please set a password' screen. A small note might be nice there.

Since I was using OpenWrt on my existing linksys e8450 it was pretty simple to configure the new accesspoint in a similar manner. Upgrade was pretty easy as soon as I realized that I needed to pick 24.10.0-rcN or snapshot on the firmware selector as there are no stable images for the One yet.

I then spent a lot of time playing with the channel_analysis page. This page scans for other accesspoints and shows you what channels are in heavy use or open. On 5ghz, there was basically nothing else, so no problems there. However, on 2.4Ghz there were an astonishing number of aps. I live out pretty far from town, but there's still a LOT of them. Of course some were coming from 'inside the house' like some roku devices or the like. Finally I decided channel 9 was the best bet.

switching things was a bit of a dance. I connected to the openwrt wireless network, logged in and changed the wired network, then powered off the old ap and swapped the network cable to the new one. Then, rejoined the wireless and changed the name/password so all the existing devices would just keep working.

I do notice faster connection rates on my main laptop at least. The accesspoint is also really responsive either via web (luci) or ssh. I may look at adding some more duties to this device over time. It does have a nvme slot so I could do some caching or perhaps some other setup. I also want to play with the usb-c console port and perhaps at some point upgrade my home switch so I can power it via PoE.

All in all a pretty great device. It seems to currently be sold out, but if you are looking for a nice, unbrickable ap that is very open source, this might just be the ticket for you.

Hello again everyone.

After using wordpress for more than 20 years, I finally decided it was time to move off of it. I'm not really happy about the recent turmoil from the upstream wordpress folks, and I didn't think there was too much value over just moving to a static generator as so many have before me.

I did some looking around, and decided to just go with nikola. It uses python and seems pretty well used. It also has a wordpress import plugin which I hoped to use.

The first problem I ran into is that the 'nikola plugin' command didn't work. I couldn't see that I had done anything to break it, and some poking around let me see that this was a bug in 8.3.0 (which is what the current fedora rpm version is), but was fixed in 8.3.1 (released early this year). There is already a PR to update it:

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-nikola/pull-request/6

So, I built the new version locally and plugin was back in business.

The wordpress_import plugin worked somewhat, but there were a few issues I hit there too. It tracebacked if I passed '--one-file' to use the new one file format (instead of a content and a metadata file). I looked at it a bit, but couldn't figure out where it was failing. I did have to tweak a bit of the wordpress export, mostly for mistakes that wordpress ignored, like posts with multiple of the same tag on them, etc.

I looked a bit at comments. I have 81 comments on all my posts over the last 21 years, but there are none in the last 5 years. There is a 'static_comments' plugin that lets you serve the old static comments, which looked promising, but it was not very clear to me how to insert it into the theme I picked to use ('hack'). The doc example has jinja2 examples, and just a 'adjust accordingly for mako templates'. I didn't want to spend a bunch of time learning mako templates, so for now I am just going to drop the comments. If I get time or someone wants to help me get static_comments working, let me know.

Builds are quite fast and it's an easy rsync to my main server. Hopefully this all will make me blog a bit more now.

This post will likely cuse aggregators (like fedoraplanet.org) to see all my recent posts again. Sorry about that.

So, rewind to earlier this year: There were 2 laptop announcements of interest to me.

First was the snapdragon X arm laptops that were going to come out. qualcomm was touting that they would have great linux support and they were already working on merging things upstream. Nothing is ever that rosy, but I did pick up a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x that I have been playing with. Look for a more detailed review and status on that one in a bit. Short summary is that it's a pretty cool laptop and mainstream linux support is coming along, but it's not yet reading to be a daily laptop IMHO.

The second was framework announcing a new batch of laptops would be coming out with some nice upgrades, so I pre-ordered one of the ryzen ones. But reader, you may ask: "don't you already have a framework ryzen laptop? and aren't they supposed to be upgradable? So why would you order another one?". To which I answer: yes, and yes, and... because I wanted so many new things it seemed easier to just order a new one and get a spare/second laptop out of it.

I have one of the very first generation framework 13 laptops. It was originally ordered as a intel 11th gen cpu/mb shipped in July of 2021, almost 3.5 years ago. So whats in the newer/latest version that I wanted?

• Better hinges (the old ones are kinda weak and you can cause the display to 'flop' if you carry it by that.
• New top cover. The old one is the old multipart one, the new ones have a one part aluminum one.
• New camera thats supposedly better.
• New battery (ok, I replaced the battery in my old one a while back, but always nice to have a new battery)
• Replacement input cover (the thing with the keyboard/touchpad). After hammering mine for 3.5 years, the tab and/or alt keys stick and result in moving between windows being frustrating. Also, new one has no windows key, just a 'super' key.
• Higher resolution / refresh rate display. (120hz and 2880x1920 and matte vs 60hz and 2256x1504 and glossy). In particular the glossy is very anoying in highly reflecting areas.

So, I could have replaced all those things, but at that point it seemed like it would be easier to just move to a new chassis and have a spare.

Of course things didn't go as planned. The laptop arrived and I swapped my memory and nvme drive over to it and... it didn't boot. Spend a fair bit of time with framework support back and forth. They wanted movies / pictures of most everything and had me do a bunch of things to isolate the problems. They decided it was a bad monitor/display cable and input cover. So, they shipped those replacements to me (they had to replace the display because the cable is attached to it). Unfortunately, they shipped them USPS, so it took about 9 days and because we don't get USPS here I had to go rescue it from the local postoffice before they sent it back.Today I swapped in the display and input cover and everything worked like a charm. A quick switch of memory and nvme I am am now booted on the new laptop.

So, I was going to try and do these posts more regularly, but of course thats hard to do. After flock there was a bunch of things I wanted to post, then a bunch of fires and so things got behind. Such is life, so here's a few things I wanted to talk about in more detail from the last month or so. As always, I do still post on mastodon daily, happy to answer questions or comments there as things happen and expand on things in posts like this.

Fedora 41 branched off rawhide! This I think went much more smoothly than the last cycle. I like to hope it's because we documented all the things that were not right last time and did them this time. There were a few more things to adjust, it wasn't perfect, but it was much better!

We upgraded our OpenShift cluters from 4.15 to 4.16. I continue to be very happy how smooth OpenShift upgrades are. Not 100% seamless, but pretty good. This time we had some storage stuff that caused the upgrade to not finish, but it wasn't too hard to work around. So much nicer than the old 3.x days.

We landed a bunch of koji/kiwi changes before Beta freeze. Kudos to Neal Gompa and Adam Williamson for working through all those. It was nice to mostly get everything lined up before Freeze so we didn't have to be doing a lot of churn. We got everything working in rawhide first, then merged the f41 changes.

Had a really anoying IPA outage. I was running our main playbook (runs over everything) on a thursday night, just to make sure everything was in sync for the freeze, and... our playbook thought all our ipa servers were not configured right and tried to uninstall and resync them all. Luckily the server that was the CA master refused to uninstall, so we were still up on one server. From that we were able to reinstall/resync the other 2 and get things back up and working. I am still not sure why the playbook saw no dirserv running on the servers (and thus thought they were unconfigured). We are going to adjust that playbook to definitely not try and do that, and instead move setting up a replica to a manual playbook only run by humans as needed.

Thanks to a bunch of work from Stephen Gallagher and Carl George, eln and epel10 are now doing composes just like we do for rawhide and branched. This should allow us to retire our old ODCS (on demand compose service) setup, as its not really maintained upstream anymore and is on EOL os versions. Great to get things all running the same way, but of course we will probibly change everything next year or something.

We managed to sign off on Fedora 41 Beta being released next week. I was pretty amazed, as it didn't seem like we had enough time to really shake out all the bugs, but testing coverage ended up being pretty good. Looking forward to Beta next week and end of Beta freeze.

Last friday at flock, we had a Infrastructure and Release Engineering workshop/hackfest. It was from 9am to 1pm, so 4 hours and we used them all. We did take a couple of breaks, but overall we powered through discussing the entire agenda.

Before the workshop we brainstormed a bunch of disucssion items at: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/planning-for-infra-and-releng-hackfest-at-flock-2024/110244 and created a hackmd document to record notes into: https://hackmd.io/HxpzTNpITfu0OYmOGRApiw

I'm going to list here each topic, some notes about it and then any action items from that.

• "Standards for OpenShift app deployments" - We run, but don't develop a number of applications in our OpenShift cluster. Right now the deployment methods are all over the map. Some apps use a source2image setup with production and staging branches, others just pull an image from quay.io where it's unclear how that image is made or could be adjusted, still others build local images, still others do even more different things. This makes it hard for us to debug or know what base images are in use. Also, some playbooks automatically fire off builds or deployments and they shouldn't. We should split this out to manual playbooks if we need it, but normally OpenShift will just do whatever is needed.
  • ACTION: create comments in each app playbook that explains how it's deployed
  • ACTION: with OpenShift 4.16 we will need to move all our apps that still have deploymentconfig to use deployment.
  • ACTION: Look at deploying ACS (advanced cluster security) to gain more visibility when we have out of date or vulnerable images.
  • ACTION: create a "best practices" guide (next to our development guide) doc that explains the way we consider best to deploy apps in our clusters. All of humaton, zlopez, smiller, dkirwan, abompard, lachmanfrantisek, lsm5, mohanboddu expressed interest in helping on this.
• "Infra SIG packages" - We have a packaging group called "infra-sig" that maintains a bunch of packages that we use (or used to use). The group doesn't have too many active members these days and we really need to look at what packages are in it and orphan ones we don't use/need/want anymore.
  • ACTION: Find someone(s) to propose packages to orphan / add
  • ACTION: Onboard them with packit to help us reduce maint. We can get packit folks a list and they can mass onboard them for us
  • ACTION: look at list of folks in the sig and remove those who are no long around/interested.
• "Discuss Releng packages"
  • ACTION: come up with list of releng packages that are owned directly by release engineering and add them to infra sig
• "Discuss proxy network: move to nginx? change things? or keep?" - We had a bit of discussion about moving away from httpd to nginx or gunicorn. In the end we didn't really come to much consensus on this one, needs further discussion. We do have a lot of ansible playbooks that are apache dependent and things are broadly working ok with the setup we have. HTTP/3 support would be nice as would better perf, but not a requirement.
• "Discuss making aws more ansiblized/managed, or not?" - We didn't really come to much conclusion on this one either. One problem is that our main amazon account is a subaccount of the amazon community account, so we can't divide it anymore and lots of groups use that, so we can't fully manage it very easily anyhow. This one also needs more thought I think.
• "Discuss onboarding, what we can do to make it better" - we had a pretty nice discussion on this one, including some folks that are not involved right now with some great perspectives.
  • ACTION: kevin to post outline of docs changes and submit WIP PR for them for people to add to.
  • ACTION: after docs are in better shape, look at marketing to potential contributors
  • ACTION: after each release look at having a 'Hello' day where new folks can join and ask questions and learn about the setup.
• OpenShift apps deployment info - Did a quick tutorial on how we deploy apps for all those present. Should be folded into the docs above.
• "Look ahead: gitforge, bugzilla, matrix server" - This was just a discussion on all these things that are coming in the next year. It's going to be a ton of work.
• "Retire wiki pages / migrate to docs" - We talked about where end user docs might live over contributor/member docs. We talked about all the wiki pages that we want to migrate _somewhere_
  • ACTION: some more discussion about where end user docs should go. Perhaps talk to the docs team?
  • ACTION: Someone(s) to look at the docs in https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Infrastructure and archive/delete or migrate them all.
• "Datagrepper access" - This was a discussion about the commops team wanting to do database queries on datagrepper for community metrics. It's logistically difficult to get access to the actual database from anywhere the tools they want to run are. So, after a bit of gathering requirements, we brainstormed a solution: Setup a database in AWS using RDS, load a recent dump from datagrepper to it and then setup some datanommer instances in communishift (or wherever) that listen to our message bus and just insert new messages as they come. This was it should be up to date, but cause no load for the main datagrepper instance (it would be completely seperate!). We now have tickets pending to do this work for them.
  • ACTION: infra folks to work tickets to get things setup alongside commops folks
  • ACTION: commops to install and use whatever frontends they want to query the RDS db.
• ARA in infra - This would be nice reporting for us, although there was some discussion that if we get AWX setup it would have much of the same reporting in it. We left this I think as sort of a 'If someone had time and wanted to look at setting it up they could".
• AWX deployment - We talked about issues/roadblocks on AWX. It isn't really setup to handle the way our ansible repo is setup (with a public and a private repo). We should be able to move it forward for a proof of concept tho and can then decide how we want to redo our repos or if we do want to. Reworking things to be more standard would also allow us to have example values for secrets so people could test/deploy/use our playbooks more easily in CI or other places.
  • ACTION: kevin to check on status and see if we can stand up the POC
  • ACTION: once thats in place, discuss redoing things or other options.
• "zabbix checkin/testing/planning" - We have a zabbix setup thats pretty far along, we want to move it forward so we can retire nagios. Talked about the current status and ideas on moving things forward.
  • ACTION: Setup a bot channel that sends zabbix alerts so we can see what it's alerting on in order to adjust settings.
  • ACTION: adjust alerts based on above and based on when nagios alerts and zabbix doesn't.
  • ACTION: see about moving to next LTS version that has some improvments.
• We then went to looking at our github repos for the fedora-infra group. We archived a bunch of old projects, a great way to end things!

I do wish we would have had a way to let remote folks interact with the workshop. We tried a google meet, but the hotel network was not kind to us on friday. So, there are a lot of actions above, we need to find people to match to them! Let us know if you have interest in helping us out.

All in all a great workshop and we used all our time and had some great discussions!

beware, this is going to be pretty long. I split these up by day in the past, but somehow this time I just kept adding to one post. We start with 2 days before and wrap up with some general thoughts.

Day -2 (monday, 2024-08-05): travel day. When I originally booked my travel I had a nice set of two flights in the afternoon/evening and all was fine, but then they canceled my first flight and rebooked me on a much earlier flight. So, I got up around 4am, showered and grabbed coffee and off to the airport. I had left a bunch of room in case traffic in portland was bad, but it turned out of course that it was fine and I had lots of time. Then to MDW for a 5 hour layover. Had a beer and a chicken sandwitch and caught up on email a bit there. Then, my second (and last) flight from MDW to ROC. This was supposed to be just over an hour, but turns out we had to wait about 45m for a connecting flight to arrive, then when we got almost to landing, it turned out there was a bunch of rain, so they had to circle around for another 30min or so. Then a quick taxi to the hotel and I crashed hard.

Day -1 (tuesday, 2024-08-06): I had planned a day before to recover from travel and try and get used to the time zone differences. I did manage to sleep in a bit and then met up with ab and ngompa for breakfast. We discussed all kinds of things and had a very nice time I think. I then went over to the coffee shop off the lobby for a bit of hacking and met up with a few more fedorans that were arriving. Then, off to dinosaur bbq for lunch. Was quite good! After lunch got together with some folks to talk about gitforge requirements. Added some to the investigation. Then, off to the leadership dinner with a bunch of other folks. Sadly a number of folks coming in today had travel problems (there were a bunch of really big rainstorms on the east coast of the US). Some of them had to take a train from NYC and only would arrive the afternoon of the next day. By the end the schedule had 20 revisions.

Day 1 - (wed - 2024-08-07): Flock begins! After a quick breakfast, off to...

• the opening "state of fedora" talk from mattdm. A few charts and graphs, but some good things to think about too.

• Next up was the FESCo roundtable. We started out with questions seeded from Aoife and then got a number of good ones from the audience as well. There was talk about recent decisions FESCo made, looks to all the upcoming possible changes and the future as well. I think it was great and we got some good questions. We kind of ran out of time in the end.
• A quick break and then on to the Council town hall. Again some great discussions and questions.
• I wanted to go to the Infrastructure projects talk after that, but I got sidetracked by the hallway track, talking to several folks I haven't seen in person in a while.
• A lunch break and then on to introducing Konflux. This was only a 25min talk, but I also hung around after and asked some more questions. If everything pans out the way it's envisioned, I think Konflux could be really great for us. It would allow us in theory to replace koji, bodhi, compose hosts, signing hosts, autosign hosts, some ci infra, a bunch of scripting around uploading and syncing things, and likely more. It's still of course super early days, but I think it's got a lot of promise. There's a test instance setup now to allow maintainers to test builds and see how things look. I have a tab open to play with this after I get back.
• Next to continue the 'big changes' theme, I went to the Git Forge replacement talk. There's example services setup here too to allow folks to look at forejo or gitlab. I'm hoping we can have a pretty good timeline to get the evaluations in and make a decision and look at deployment.
• Another quick coffee break and off to the Lean Coffee session. It was interesting. We broke into two groups and everyone around each table would write a topic on a card. Then we each voted for our top two items and then starting with the one with the most votes we discussed them each for 5minutes then if the majority wanted to continue we did another 5 minutes. We had a bunch of varied topics including: How to recognize contibutors more. How to consolidate or make contributing to docs easier. How to better handle SIGs and communication between them and the rest of the project. Some good thoughts.
• After that was my talk: Matrix: the red pill and the blue pill. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to fill up the time, but I almost ran out of time. Hopefully folks know better now how matrix is setup and the limitations and advantages it has. I will be uploading my slides next week for anyone who wants them. Basically the first part of the talk is the things you need to know as a user who is just trying to use Matrix and the second half was about how things worked and more 'geeky' details.
• Another round of hallway track talking to lots of different folks about lots of different things.
• The evening event was a board game/candy swap/karioke night in the hotel. The candy swap was super fun, it gets bigger and bigger every year. Lots of candy/snacks from all over the world and lots of great stories about them from all the fedorans there. I had even more good conversations about books, package signing, vegatables, and more. I called it a night after the karioke.

Day 2 - (thursday - 2024-08-08): The next morning started out with 2 great talks:

• "It's OK to not know things" was great advice in any field, but definitely in software/operating systems. I'd suggest you go watch the recording of this one as soon as it's available.
• Next was "How (not) to get into tech" and was a lovely history of a great progression through various roles. I suspect many of us didn't get computer science degrees and just 'happened' into what we are doing today. Also there were tons of cute dog pictures.
• Next was the Fedora mentored projects showcase. Some great work from lots of people. One great takeaway here is that when you mentor someone, then they mentor a few people, soon you have helped an entire tree of people.
• I stuck to the large room for the lenovo updates. Super glad lenovo is shipping Fedora on some of their machines, and using pretty much exactly what we ship. Sad that its not so easy to find the ones you can get with fedora, but at least they are there. Lots of new models, newly supported things coming up.
• I wanted to go to the framework talk, but I got caught up in the hallway track talking to people. I'll try and catch it once the videos are up. After that was lunch and more discussions and talking with folks.
• I got in and joined the risc-v talk already in progress (Another one(s) to watch later) and chimed in with info about the new risc-v koji hub we want to setup (hw is there, needs racking and setup).
• Dan Walsh then did a great inro to bootc talk. The entire bootc setup is very interesting and it's going to make things so much nicer down the road once we bootc all the things. looking forward to it.
• There were several talks I wanted to go to then, but again went on to hallway track. I also poked a bit at the mass resigning of rawhide with the new f42 key for next week.
• The day ended up with a Q&A from Mike Mcgrath. A number of questions around AI/ML things and discussion of open source and how things might look in the next few years. Surprisingly not many questions about source code or rebuilds.
• The day ended with a dinner at the Strong Museum of play. We went there at the last flock that was in Rochester and I remember it being fun. This time was no different, it was awesome to talk to yet more folks and then play some classic video games I remember from long ago. Gauntlet Legends was fun, Rampage, ghost busters, and centipede were all there. I used to be great at centipede, but I was really bad now. Just need to get one at home.

Day 3 - (friday - 2024-08-09):

Friday morning was all about the Infrastructure and Release Engineering workshop/hackfest that I organized. We started pretty close to 9am and kept working away with a few breaks until 1pm when lunch was ready. We had gathered a list of topics we wanted to discuss beforehand and went though them one by one. We actually did manage to at least touch on all of them. Notes were collected in our hack md doc I'm planning on reading through there this week and filing tickets for things as well as posts about plans we made. I was very happy that there were a few folks who aren't normally involved in Infra and Releng there. They chimed in on various topics like gitlab migrations, openshift configurations, ara setup, what still needs some old packages we wanted to get rid of and more. It was great to get some outside perspectives on things. I'd like to thank everyone who came! Toward the end we managed to archive a bunch of old github projects in our fedora-infra space. We came up with a plan to get commops access to datagrepper data for analytics and much more.

The afternoon Met up with Some folks and managed to figure out the AWS permissions issue that was blocking us from replacing fedimg. Hurray. Also a lot of discussion around sigul lockup debugging and secure boot chain. I wanted to go to the epel10 workshop/hackfest, but it was more important to fix up those things while I had the people involved right there to look at things.

Dinner friday night was a really nice team dinner with a bunch of co-workers. It was a big anoying that as the evening went on the place filled up with people and the base volume got higher and higher. After a point I couldn't hear anyone at all. Some of us did move away to a far corner and it was much better there, but oh well, I guess thats how it goes on a friday night.

Day 4 - (saturday - 2024-08-10):

Saturday was the mentor summit. I started to be involved in that, but then there were some folks who had some fires/blockers so I went and helped out where I could. For some reason the openqa test cluster in aws was all stopped. I restarted it and will be looking into what could have happened to it or how we can log what might have happened to it. I then dealt with some signing issues around the mass resigning and sigul lockups. Then there was a lot of great hallway track discussion on all kinds of topics

The conference ended up with a readout from a lot of folks, which I think is a great tradition. Lots of perspectives on what happened and got discussed. I tossed in my few cents.

Dinner ended up being 4 of us at a pretty nice ramen place. Good food and conversations.

Day +1 - (sunday - 2024-08-11):

Sunday had some folks going on a group trip to Niagra Falls, but I wanted to get on home, so my travel home day was sunday. Sadly, my flight was super early and I was car pooling to the airport with some other folks who left even eariler, so I had to get up at about 3:45am to meet up in the lobby at 4:30am and catch my 6:45am flight. My flight had Troy on it too, so we had some breakfast after we landed at Midway. Good to get a bit more discussion and I hadn't had much time with Troy during the conference. Managed to land around a hour late. Then the 2 hour drive home and finally I am able to crash.

Some general thoughts on the conference in no particular order:

• I wish I had had a chance to get a picture with my boss, his boss, his boss and his boss that were all there at various times. Would have made an amusing org chart thing.
• For whatever reason I seem to have spent a lot of time with Jeremy, David, and AB, but that was great as they are all wonderful humans.
• To me it seemed like there was a lot of energy around all the changes that might be coming in Fedora: Konflux, new git forge, bugzilla replacement, and more. Of course you can't predict the future, but I am pretty hopeful of all these changes.
• I was sad that a number of folks couldn't make it this time: pjones, jforbes, ausil, pbrobinson, and a bunch of folks from my work team and more.Just bad luck/timing I think, hopefully will see many of them next year.
• Flock always leaves me weary in body, but energized in spirit.

Look for a post on the discussion from the infra and releng workshop later this week.

Last week was a busy one (but aren't they all?). I did a fair bit of moving things around, and managed to quash a number more rhel7 instances: A virthost that I couldn't get to the management on finally I was able to get into so I could reinstall it, along with moving a noc vm off it once we got it's bridge to the mgmt network it needed. Finally we took down pdc as well. There's still a few loose ends with it, but keeping it up wouldn't have helped them since it wasn't getting populated anymore. Hopefully we will get those last few things done soon. They are:

• The toddler that syncs components from src.fedoraproject.org to bugzilla. We have a fixed version of that plugin, but it just needs to pass testing and we can deploy it. Until thats in place, new packages will not get bugzilla components and changes of ownership won't be reflected. Sorry for the trouble.
• A way to save compose metadata off so things like fedfind can query what packages are in composes. We are going to do this likely with just a small script that saves that data off to a filesystem, since we have the data already from pungi in composes, just need to save it.

I spent a lot of time trying to get this new lenovo slim 7x booting. I got to the point where the kernel boots and hands off, but then at the end of booting up something happens and the laptop resets. Pretty frustrating since I know others have it booting and largely working. I'm debating taking it with me to flock. Would be another thing to carry, but someone there might know what the boot issue is or how to debug it. Failing that, things are rapidly landing upstream, so it could just be something will get fixed soon. Really looking forward to it, the screen is really nice, and battery life should be super great.

Flock is next week! I will be there and am looking forward to talking with everyone. I'll be traveling basically all day on monday, trying to recover on tuesday and then flocking from wed->sat. I head home sunday. Safe travels to everyone heading to flock!

The week started with the f41 mass rebuild finishing up (it actually mostly finished over the weekend, with just a few straggling builds left). For those that don't know much about it, it's basically when we (mostly) rebuild every package in Fedora rawhide. This then picks up a number of fixes (like improved compilers/tooling) and also is a chance to confirm that packages actually build currently and aren't sitting there broken waiting for someone to need to quickly update them and find they cannot. Things were a bit slower this time because we have fewer (but larger/faster) s390x builders, so when say 8 ghc versions are all building at once, smaller things pile up behind them, but it all worked out fine in the end. We again hit a problem that happens it seems like every time now: Someone commits some change to a package to git and then either doesn't build it, or does, but it fails gating or is otherwise untagged as broken, then the mass rebuild comes along and builds it again. We have talked about some ideas to handle this better, hopefully we will get to implementing something.

Upon looking around, I found that the linux support for the new snapdragon X laptops has been moving very quickly over the last few weeks. Lots of things now work, but of course it's super early days and you really need to be willing to poke and prod to get things working. Which describes me pretty well, so I ordered a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x to play around with things. Look forward to some reviews and info about what can be made working in the short term in Fedora. Should be a lot of fun.

Did some more flock prep work this week. See the discussion thread if you have thoughts on what we should discuss or any input beforehand on anything.

I thought I would share a bit about how I handle keeping track of tasks. It's definitely not perfect, but it mostly works for me. I've tried a bunch of todo apps/task trackers and they have always felt like they have a lot of overhead. I used taskwarrior for a long while, but adjusting things there was just a lot of work (especially re-occurring meetings/events). So, I went back to something I was using from long ago: a text file. So each week I make a new text file. It lists out the days so I can add tasks that I actually did on those days as I do them, and add things I plan to do/meetings/whatever with a - in front of them. I then have a longer list of todos/pending items below that divided into ready / post freeze / planning and I put things under there to pick from when I have cycles. I also have some todos that are moved from day to day until I do them and the entire thing is copied over the next week and adjusted. The - in front of things allows me to grep those out and output all the done tasks for reports or whatever. It works reasonably well, but the ready list is long and not as well organized as it could be. Anyhow, always room for improvement.