As announced recently, there will be a outage of lists.fedoraproject.org starting at 05:00UTC on the 22nd, and lasting about 12 hours (It takes a long time to sync 82GB of small mail files :) http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/announce/2012-November/003118.html Please enjoy the mailing list silence with your loved ones.
Next week a number of Fedora Infrastructure folks will be heading out to lovely Raleigh, NC for a FAD (Fedora Activity Day) based around security. Why gather in person to work on this, instead of our usual distributed workflow? Well, we have had a rough outline of a plan to enable 2 factor authentication for all sudo access since the last fudcon (almost a year ago now), but we just keep not having everyone available or time or too many distractions, so we decided to schedule a time, get a bunch of people together and just get it done(tm). :) In a broad overview, we will be using pam_url on machines talking to either totp-cgi or fas backend that handles the 2nd factor. We hope to support yubikeys and googleauthenticator to start with as backend factors, and hope to have fas handle the enrolling, etc details. If everything goes smoothly with sudo, we may look at selective ssh enablement down the road (so, for example fedorahosted projects could choose to enable, or we could optionally enable for pkgs, etc). So, the main goal of the FAD is of course the aforementioned two factor authentication for all sudo access on all our machines, but if we have time after that we have a bunch of other security related tasks we hope to at least discuss and hash out so we can work on them in our normal distributed workflow. Monday will be a travel day, so if you are looking for infrastructure folks, please be patient. Tuesday and Wed we will be working full on on our primary task. Thursday morning will be finishing up things and traveling home. We should be all gathering in #fedora-fad on IRC for folks that want to help us out remotely. We will be meeting in the lovely new Red Hat tower. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_Infrastructure_Security_2012 has further details and tasklists and so forth. I'm confident we will finish our primary goal. :)
Between my Girlfriend and I, we have 4 android devices here (2 HTC evo 4g phones, a nexus7 and a galaxy tab 10.1). We also have a Fedora server with a bunch of storage on it that is encrypted and backed up. This weekend I spent a bit of time looking into options for using my existing storage with the android devices and also how to get them on regular backups and see about syncing things like books between them. First as far as backups on the android side there was really only one choice: TitaniumBackup. I already had the pro version and all my devices are rooted. It's pretty easy to set it up on each device and ask it to schedule backups however you want. Next step was getting that backup up to the Linux side. I looked at Titianum media sync, but it didn't sound like it would do what I wanted and it was a pay app with no preview. Some further looking around found "FolderSync", which had a 'Lite' version limited to 2 accounts. So far looking at it today this looks like it will do the job. You can have it use sftp to sync, and tell it either 'download' 'upload' or 'both directions'. You can set it to delete or not, and you can setup as many folders as you like. You can also schedule syncs. So, I simply setup a sync for the TitianiumBackup folder after it runs. I've got it all setup now, will see how it works tomorrow after everything is supposed to fire off. ;) On to books. I use coolreader. It's open source and has tons of features. It stores all it's data under /sdcard/.cr3/ (sqlite db's of positions in books, covers, cached copies of books, etc). Syncing that folder works fine, however, coolreader doesn't see that the db's have changed under it, so you have to make sure it's closed before syncing. ;( In order for it to work with FolderSync I think it's going to have to check and see if things have changed under it and load the new db's (perhaps an option). I'm not sure how hard that would be add, but the code is available at least. In the mean time I guess I will only manually sync it from the device I am using and make sure others aren't running it until I manually sync and start. If folks have some information about other readers handling this better or know a workaround for coolreader I'm all ears. ;) For Photos FolderSync seems to work fine. Just sync your DCIM directory up. I tend to stream things like video and audio content, but I could easily set them up to sync if needed. So, if all works well with FolderSync, I'll probibly support them by buying the full version (even though I actually can do everything I want with the free one right now).
This is part 5 in a series about finding out all the cool stuff going on in Fedora. This time, lets talk social media. ;) First of all if you are reading this, likely you are seeing it on planet.fedoraproject.org or the like. This planet pulls feeds posts marked with "Fedora" for interested folks. More information on adding your blog at: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Planet You can also if you are interested, download a xml file that allows you to subscribe directly to the blogs aggregated on the planet: http://planet.fedoraproject.org/foafroll.xml Fedora has a pretty active google+ group. You can "+1" and add it to your circles at: https://plus.google.com/112917221531140868607 You can find a more full list of groups on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_social_networks
This is part 4 of a series about finding out about all the cool stuff going on in Fedora. This time it's updates. Fedora updates packages all the time in a pretty heavy flow. How can you see whats being updated where and help test them out? Bodhi (The Fedora updates system) has some handy rss feeds of updates. Go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/ and look at the rss links next to the thing you want to watch. There's a feed for each branches pending (hasn't been pushed out yet), testing (in the updates-testing repo), updates (in stable updates repo), and security (is a security update). Package updates also go to 2 mailing lists: For stable updates the http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/package-announce list, and for updates-testing a summary report goes to the test list: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test As always, the fedora message bus includes messages when updates are created or package updates move from one state to another:
This is part 3 of a series of posts about information Fedora produces about what going on in the project. Up this time: meetings. Various groups in Fedora meet (usually on IRC) weekly or bi-weekly and discuss issues around their area of the project. Whats the best way to follow all these meetings? First you can simply have your IRC client idle and log #fedora-meeting, #fedora-meeting-1 and #fedora-meeting-2 on irc.freenode.net. Almost all meetings take place in there. One notable exception is the QA groups blocker bug meetings, those take place in #fedora-qa (mostly because they tend to last a long time and they don't want to block off the meeting channel for others the entire time). What if you don't have time to read through all those minutes? Most groups send a summary out to their groups mailing list after each meeting. If you are on each of those lists you can read the summaries there. If you don't want to join a bunch of lists, there's a handy meeting minutes list that all groups copy their meeting summaries to: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/meetingminutes Simply subscribe there and you will get copies of all groups minutes delivered direct to your mailbox. As with wiki changes or package commits you can also see these changes on the fedmsg bus:
This is part 2 of a series. See: http://www.scrye.com/wordpress/nirik/2012/10/22/fedoras-myriad-information-channels-part-1/ for part 1. Package changes. Fedora the distribution is all about changes and updates to packages. How can you watch those changes happen? First of all, packages commits are send to the http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/scm-commits list. Along with uploads of new versions to the lookaside cache and pkgdb changes (changes to acls on packages). Be ready if you subscribe for a pretty hefty flow of emails. As with wiki changes you can also see these changes on the fedmsg bus:
Fedora has many different (and increasing all the time) ways to see whats going on and follow changes. Since there are so many of them these days, I figured I do a series of short blog posts highlighting some of information channels available for any folks that might want to use them. The Fedora Project wiki is used for a great many things:
A long time ago (back when it existed), I installed wordpress-mu (multiuser) so I could host blogs for myself and other folks here at scrye.com. Then wordpress-mu merged back with wordpress and I kind of hacked it so it kept working. Fast forward to today: A friend asked for a new blog, but I couldn't login to the admin interface due to weird wordpress / wordpress-mu redirects and database issues. :( So, I sat down, fixed up the database to point to wordpress only, fixed config and got everything working again. So, hopefully everything is now nice and vanilla wordpress now and should work more smoothly for everyone (especially me).
I'm happy to announce the general availability of our status.fedoraproject.org site. This site provides an easy way for Fedora contributors and users to check on the status of services provided by Fedora Infrastructure. The site auto reloads every minute, and also provides a rss feed at http://status.fedoraproject.org/changes.rss of any changes. If you run into a problem or issue that is not reflected at status.fedoraproject.org, please do report it to us in #fedora-admin on irc.freenode.net or via ticket at fedora infrastructure trac. We update the site status information manually so we need to be aware of the issue in order to keep the site accurate. As with everything in Fedora Infrastructure, this application is open source. Source is available from: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/fedora-status.git and is released under a GPLv2+ license. This application is hosted at OpenShift to avoid any issues with outages in our infrastructure affecting status reporting.