Wanted to mention to everyone 2 changes related to fedorahosted.org. First of all, we switched over to cgit from gitweb-caching. This move was a bit rockier than I wished, as I didn't have all the apache redirects I meant to in place and working right. So, if you followed a link to git.fedorahosted.org/gitweb/ in the last day or so, it probibly broke. The redirects are now in place and should hopefully be redirecting your old gitweb URL's to the new shiny cgit. If you are using links moving forward, please use the cgit links, and not the old gitweb ones. If you see problems with old gitweb urls, do file a ticket or drop by #fedora-admin on freenode and we can see if we can add an additional redirect to help your case. Additionally, this change highlighted the fact that it's hard to notify fedorahosted.org consumers about changes. Currently we have a number of Fedora lists that discuss such things, but it's hard to filter out just hosted changes from them. So, I have created a fedorahosted-announce list. This list will be moderated and low volume and will note any changes, updates, migrations or related to fedorahosted.org services. You can subscribe to this one list and be kept in the loop about downtime or upgrades. The new list is at: http://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/fedorahosted-announce If you would like to suggest changes or help out with fedorahosted.org maintenance, you should use the fedora-infrastructure list.

Folks who access fedoraproject.org resources may have noticed in the last week that things have become a bit faster. The reason for this is simple: We have a new sponsor of Fedora Infrastructure! I'd like to welcome Colocation America to the folks that provide Fedora Infrastructure resources. In this case they have graciously donated to us the use of a server in their Los Angles data center. We have put this server to use as a proxy and application server, so if you are going to any fedoraproject.org sites and you are in North America you will likely be accessing us from there. If you are in the market for a server, do take a look at their offerings for Linux Dedicated Servers. The support and administrative contacts there have been quick to respond and have been quite knowledgeable. They support native IPv6 connectivity (which we are using as well). The can install Fedora 17 as a base OS choice. Console access is available to help you with re-installing or off line work, and so far the network has been very solid. Support us by supporting them! See our sponsors page for a full list of sponsors.

Last night I played around with the device encryption on my nexus 7. First of all, android uses dm_crypt, just like a Fedora install would. cryptsetup however is not used, android has it's own interface to the kernel for doing things. When you encrypt your device, the entire sdcard/data device is encrypted. The only way to 'undo' this is to wipe everything with a factory reset. Before encrypting, you need to setup a password and that password is used for the luks volume. The encryption itself goes pretty smoothly, it reboots your device and encrypts and then boots again and prompts you for the password to unlock. You will now be prompted on every boot. There's a few gotchas and things to note for folks interested in doing this however: If you are using a non stock recovery, (like ClockworkMod or the like), you will be unable to access your sdcard data from recovery. This means you cannot do nandroid backups or update from a update thats stored on sdcard. There is another recovery I found that has added unlocking encrypted partition support, but I have not yet tried it: http://teamw.in/project/twrp2 There is also a workaround for applying rom updates: Use adb to mount a tmpfs on /sdcard, copy your update over to it and then recovery can update it. This will of course only work if the update will fit. I hope there's encrypted unlock support added to the various recoveries out there and then there will be little reason not to encrypt your android devices, IMHO.

It seems like many places are now setting up or making people use 'security questions'. These are questions (and answers) that can be used to verify your identity in the event that your password is forgotten or are otherwise locked out of your access. Sometimes they will be all electronic, sometimes they will be asked of you over the phone. I actually don't mind the idea of 'security questions' so much as the horribly stupid way they are implemented at most places. Here's a short list of things that I have seen wrong with security question implementations:

• Forcing you to choose from a standard list of questions people could easily find out: Usually these are things like "Your high school mascott" or "Your mothers maiden name". Do you think someone who wants to impersonate you and gain access won't be able to google where you went to school? Or look up your mother's maiden name?
• Forcing you to choose from a standard list of questions people could easily guess about you: These are often things like "What is your favorate color?" If the person seeking your access knows you at all, they could quite possibly quess here and get it.
• Additionally if the questions are standardized, an attacker can try and fail on some account they don't care about, then since they know what the questions are, they can gather that info for targeting specific users later.

So, how can you do things better? Make the answers and questions something the end user selects. They don't have to make sense to the questioner, just to you. Free form even allows you to just make both question and answer a random jumble (provided you can remember it or keep it stored safely). The idea is that it should be something only you can answer, and stock questions make it much easier for others to guess or find out your answers.

Fedora Elections are open for votes until 2012-06-07 23:59UTC. The Fedora Board (electing 3 seats), FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) (electing 5 seats), and FAMSCo (Fedora Ambassadors Steering committee) (electing all 7 seats) are all awaiting your informed voting decisions. ;) To vote for the Fedora Board you simply need an account and to have signed the FPCA. The other two, you will need to be in at least one more group, but it's pretty easy to contribute to Fedora, so join up somewhere and help out and get a vote too. Disclaimer: I am a FESCo nominee, but feel free to vote for others if you feel they are more qualified. Just go Vote!

As I noted recently ( Fedora 17 and updates-testing ) In the run up to Fedora 17 release, the updates-testing repo has been disabled. If you are wanting to use 'yum distro-sync' to sync your pre-release machine up to stable updates/base repo packages only, there's a few gotchas you might run into:

• First the fftw package decided to reorg how it's subpackages were setup. (IMHO not a great idea right before release). The version in updates-testing is one libs package, but the base version is a bunch more subpackages.
• Next you may run into colord-gtk issues. colord grew a new colord-gtk subpackage (IMHO not a great change right before a release either).

To work around these, try: yum shell remove colord-gtk remove fftw-libs-double fftw-libs-long fftw-libs-quad fftw-libs-single downgrade colord downgrade fftw-libs distro-sync I'll try and update this post with any more of these I find... feedback welcome.

Yesterday, we finally had to make the decision to send Merlin on his way. It never gets any easier to make that decision, but once again, I think we made the right one at the right time. (At least I keep telling myself that). Merlin was a beautiful blue brindle (one of the rarest colors of greyhounds) boy. His owners had high hopes for his racing carrier, but it never went anywhere, and he retired when he was only 18 months old, having never run an official race. He went into his life of retirement to a great place: a family where he learned all the obedience commands (He had his Canine Good Citizen Cert), dog agility, and how to teach other greyhounds how to live in a home. He also helped raise a bunch of greyhound puppies over time, keeping them in line and showing them the ropes. When I first moved to Colorado and thought about adopting a greyhound, I went to a meet and greet and there he was. So handsome, soft and alive. He was the first greyhound I met in colorado and the one that sent me on my way adopting and fostering. Then, when he was around 5, he came to me. At first he was afraid. He had major seperation anxiety anytime I left the house, but soon he learned that I would ALWAYS come back to him. He became my velcro dog. If I went upstairs, so did he. If I went on a trip, he wanted to go too. Here too he showed foster dogs how to run up stairs, play with stuffed toys and enjoy life. We spent many many many days out at the greyhound booth at the ren faire. Merlin didn't really care about being there or the people or attention out there, he just wanted to be with me (and later Wendy as he bonded with her too). While at the booth he would hang back and sleep and lay down, not caring too much about people petting him. When we would leave the booth, he would move up front, scanning the crowds until we returned... jumping for joy at our arrival (literally). He was a champion "roacher" (laying on back with all legs in the air like a dead cockroach): Last year he was diagnosed with a thymoma in his chest. They didn't give too good a chance, but we looked in his eyes and saw that he was going to stay with us, so he had a 4+ hour surgery and they removed a double fist sized thymoma from his chest. Amazingly he recovered and got another year to spend with us. He still tossed stuffed toys around and would from time to time run around the yard. Good bye Merlin. You touched more lives than you can know. I will never forget you.

Xfce 4.10 was released to the world 2012-04-28 and Fedora rawhide was updated in the days right after that. (Thanks Christoph!) Our Fedora 18 feature has been approved: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Xfce-4.10 My side repo for existing Fedora releases has been updated also to 4.10 final, and I have also built for Fedora 16 as well now. See: http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/kevin/xfce-4.10 for a repo file for your /etc/yum.conf.d/ directory. Lots of nice new little bugfixes and additions in Xfce 4.10. Give it a try today.

If you have a Fedora 17 install and updated recently (since saturday), you may or may not have noticed that the updates-testing repo is now disabled. It's enabled for testing during most of the pre-release cycle of Fedora, but as we get close to release time (and we are), updates-testing is disabled. So, if you are a tester/qa person/wanting to help test in the run up to release you may wish to re-enable updates-testing (a simple: 'su -c 'yum-config-manager --enable updates-testing'' should do). You can then update and use the excellent 'fedora-easy-karma' tool to provide testing feedback. If you are not interested in testing things out, and want to just have your install more or less as it will be when it's released on the 22nd, you may want to run a 'yum distro-sync'. This should downgrade your packages to the base versions from any you have installed from updates-testing. If you don't do this you may run into odd problems about packages not available or mismatches when trying to install 32bit packages on a 64bit install or the like.

Yesterday I had to say goodbye to a long time friend. ;( Farewell Bitters. I'll miss your mrows from the kitchen, your so very loud purring (missing these last few weeks), and your curled up calico self. 1993(ish) - 2012