A quick followup from my previous post about using gnome shell for a week from a sysadmin view. I got a number of responses on irc and via email. Some of them providing handy hints and solutions or at least work arounds to some of the issues I ran into. I am happy to report that everyone who offered me suggestions/workarounds/tips were very polite and many were in agreement that some of these were issues that should get fixed or implemented.

• There was only 1 extension compatible with 3.13.x, but mentioning that got at least one other one fixed, so then there was two. However, then rawhide switched to 3.13.90 and we are back to 0. ;) One thing to note however is that there's some extensions that are packaged in Fedora at least along side gnome shell, so those will always be available. Thats 13 of the very most common/supported ones. I've gone down to just using 2 of them: panel world clock and weather. 
• As many people pointed out, unchecking 'Two finger scrolling" means enabling "Edge scrolling". This isn't very clear from the interface. Bastien Nocera was kind enough to file this (and several other bugs based on my feedback.:) https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735148
• There was a fair bit of feedback on my laptop lid close always suspends rant. Working around it in logind.conf was popular. There were suggestions to just not close the lid for some of my use cases. logind.conf does have a 'lock' option which mostly will work for what I want. I'd really like to see some way to handle this in the UI however. Will try and talk to gnome designers and see if anything can be done. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720295 was filed to make sure the touchscreen is off when the lid is closed.
• Someone helpfully suggested for dropping ssh key's on screenlock that I could use a dbus-monitor script to watch gnome-screensaver. I've done so, and you can find the small script and .desktop file at: http://www.scrye.com/~kevin/fedora/dropkeys/ Additionally, Bastien filed a bug about adding this in a more usable way: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735149
• The message tray rework I was reading about apparently isn't going to land in 3.14, but 3.16 most likely.
• The Location item in the menu seems to be gone in 3.13.90, so I guess having it show location isn't going to happen. ;)
• Adding an explicit UTC location for the clock: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692243

As as side note gnome-session-wayland now works ok for me in rawhide. I'd probibly use that day to day, but the touchpad handling is still really primitive. There's no tap to click or edge scrolling or 1 2 3 finger presses which I use all the time.

You don't see too many of these posts anymore, I suspect because most folks (Myself included) are pretty set in their ways so if they haven't switched to gnome3, they aren't as likely to anymore. Mostly I wanted to look at wayland and gnome3 in rawhide has a handy way to do that, so I decided I should try and give gnome another try (it's been years) and see if it still wasn't for me. Also, I thought it would be good to get some better up to date info on things to help other users out, even if I did go back to my regular desktop. Also, there has been a fair bit of talk about capturing the 'sysadmin' user for Fedora workstation, and since I am a sysadmin, I thought it might help out if I tried things out and pointed out issues I ran into. Sadly, the wayland/gnome-shell in rawhide right now (at least with my hardware) is very crashy. It's not really possible to use it day to day and get any kind of feel for things. Also, things like tap to click aren't possible there and thats way way too disruptive to my workflow to handle right now. So, I decided since I was already trying things out, might as well just give gnome3 under X a shot again. Of course this is rawhide, so some things I ran into could well have been bugs or general brokenness. Some ground rules I decided for myself: I wouldn't tell anyone in advance I was doing this (so I could ask them later if they thought I was more or less productive) and I wouldn't seek help on IRC or mailing lists, only ddg searches or looking around myself. I probibly spent about an hour configuring my apps and basic stuff so it would be usable at first, then poked at various things as I went along and they bothered me. Here's a list of observations, in no particular order:

• There's amusingly only 1 gnome extension available that works with the gnome version in rawhide. World clock. I was confused for a bit before I saw the dropdown to have it search for all versions.
• Of course this meant that I had to search out the magic incantation to disable the version check so other extensions would work. Perhaps this could be added to a UI somewhere? Or at least gnome-tweak-tool?
• Some extensions still wouldn't work or install, and I could see no feedback on why. Perhaps allow some kind of log viewing from the extensions setting pref?
• The two finger scrolling is fine, but I was used to edge scrolling... wish there was an option for it, as it feels more natural to me. Of course it's only one synclient command away.
• I am very very very anoyed by not being able to set it to do nothing on lid close on AC power. Of course I can and did, but I had to bypass the settings entirely and add my own startup script with an inhibit. I understand that the default should be for it to suspend, but not allowing users to override this is doing them a disservice. I'd be happy if there was a warning, or even a dconf key that you had to look up, or anything. Just removing any way to do it within gnome makes people go and bypass it (in systemd or via a inhibt script), so you don't really get anything positive by forcing them to do this other than the impression that you don't care about their perfectly valid use cases.
• For many many years I had a small script that I used with xscreensaver. It would listen for lock events and run 'ssh-add -D' and tell the keyring to forget my gpg passphrases and tell keepassx to lock. I couldn't find any way to get gnome screensaver to do this. Would be wonderful if it was a pref. I think there's lots of folks who don't want their keys to be unlocked on their laptop while they are away from it. Alternately a timeout after which it would forget, or a option to make it always ask for your passphrase would be welcome.
• Not natively saving sessions seems odd to me as well. I was easily able to add my apps via gnome-tweak-tool, but why wouldn't you want to restart all the things someone had running after a relogin? Restarting apps all the time is a waste of time, especially when you run rawhide and reboot daily or so.
• The message tray doesn't really do too great with non native gnome apps. Hexchat for example shows up there, but I can't see any of it's back notifications or anything. Some notifications appear and then go away, never to be seen again. I'd really love a queue I could scroll through and clear. I gather a revamp of notifications is planned for 3.14, so we will see. Also, it seems some notifications do show up ok from hexchat, so not sure what causes some of them to not stay around.
• One amusing bit of fallout from disabling suspend on lid close: My laptop has a touchscreen and sometimes when closed the keyboard presses on it somehow and generates events. One night I closed the laptop and went to bed, only to be woken up a short time later by my Girlfriend. She indicated my laptop was making crazy noises. It seems it managed to enable the 'screen reader' assist on the lockscreen and was trying to read the garbage in the login box. I then disabled the 'show assistive menu' option. ;) I guess no one runs into this because they suspend always on lid close. :(
• One issue I ran into a few years ago was that I switch between things a great deal. I want it to be fast. I am happy to say that alt-tab is working pretty nicely to switch between applications now. It's nearly as quick as a desktop change in Xfce. I'm pretty impressed with the advance in graphics handling.
• A few times now I have had gnome shell suddenly make everything unusably big (like it forgot it's on a HIDPI display). I haven't been able to pinpoint what causes this yet, but definitely a anoying bug. When I happens sometimes I need to reboot, sometimes just restart the session/gdm.
• I wish there was a way to save the positional settings for gnome-terminal better. I can get it to start one on login, but then I need to move it where I want it, start another few, etc. For sysadmin use, terminals are really important. Remebering which were tiled, how many tabs, etc would be very helpful. I finally settled on 2 terminals tiled to each side and running tmux locally on one and the other for remote tmux on our Fedora admin host. Having to set them up each time was a bit of a annoyance tho.
• https://github.com/hadess/iio-sensor-proxy works nicely (at least until I suspend) for autorotating on my yogo 2 pro. Nice work! :)
• The "shield" has some issues as many folks have mentioned of late. I would be very happy with the proposed patch that makes it appear on any one keypress and go away on any second keypress. I always use shift or control on screensavers so as not to send input to them I don't intend or can't see. It would also be nice if the shield detected the lid was closed and just refused anything until the lid opens.
• (very minor) The menu has "Location" and says it's enabled. If I click on that I get a "disable" Option. How about displaying what it thinks my location is there? Or an option to 'refresh' or something.
• I like having a UTC clock, and was able to add one with the panel world clock, but there was no UTC option, I had to read comments to see I needed to select some city in iceland. Please add a UTC option.
• The brightness I have selected doesn't seem to persist through reboots. :( systemd correctly resets it when I boot up, but then when I login I get 100% full brightness. Not sure if thats intentional, or a bug.
• I'm not really using workspaces currently. It seems like they should be more useful, but it just seems like they make things harder to switch between. I suppose if you had several very clearly different tasks that you switched between rarely it could be nice.

So, thats after a week of use. ;) Am I going to stick with it? I'm not fully sure... I think I could be productive and use it full time, but a few of the issues are irritating. I'd put the lid suspend issue at the top, then saving of terminal positions next, followed by the inability to hook into the lockscreen or have options for forgetting ssh/gpg. All the rest are pretty minor overall, and I don't think I was all that much less productive. I'll likely file a few bugs I ran into and chime in on a few more and see what happens over the next few weeks on those...

Flock 2014 has been over for almost a week now and I've caught up a bit on sleep and had a bit of time to ponder on the conference, so I thought I would share a wrap up post with those thoughts. The venue and organization were great! My only minor nit pick at all would be that the talks on the last few days were in classrooms that were a bit too small for the audiences we had. Otherwise from my point of view everything was very very smooth. Many thanks again to the organizers, I know it's a ton of work and full of stress. I really like the idea of alternating flock between North America and Europe. It's wonderful to see so many talks I know on line in person, and it's only fair to let them have the short travel once in a while. :) There was a lot of positive energy. Everyone was very upbeat in general and wanting to learn and make things better. There were definitely pointed questions in various talks, but all of them I heard were done from a viewpoint of learning or suggesting improvements. I think partially this had to do with that we have committed to a path with Fedora.next and everyone is focusing on how to make that happen and succeed. Next years flock will be interesting as we should know how well Fedora 21 went by then. ;) As usual there were too many interesting things going on to take them all in at once. I was very happy all the talks were being recorded, so I was able to go back and watch a few things that I didn't get a chance to get to later. It will of course depend on the venue next year, but I'd love to see a large room with lots of chairs and tables we could move around for a open hacking room. That way groups could get together to work on something, but allow quick questions between groups and would allow folks just wandering around to see what each group was doing by just hanging out in the room for a bit. Many of us are introverts, so I wonder also if some kind of game or badge quest might be nice to get people talking to each other that normally wouldn't. Something like a badge for gathering a token from all fesco members or other groups. Something to ponder for next year. Finally, this flock was a bit bittersweet, because my Friend, co-worker and community member Toshio is moving on to do some other things for a while. He will be dearly missed, and I hope we see him back in a while, richer for his travels,  but only time will tell. Safe travels Toshio.

Saturday seemed to come in even more early than the previous days. It's hard at things like flock... you want to be rested, but there's so much going on you don't want to miss things, so I usually just try and suck it up and sleep once things are over. ;)

• I was going to go to the dnf/rpm talk, but it was already standing room only by the time I got there. I'll watch the video later I guess. From the slides I did see there's some great things coming along.
• I helped out our kernel folks by rebooting a test machine for them. This is one of the machines they run their kernel test suite on. See Justins talk about how you too can run the tests, submit them and get a badge. ;)
• Pierre and I worked on switching out our fasClient cron job setup for a fedmsg enabled setup. Before, every machine in our infrastructure would run from cron the fasClient tool to sync local shell account information from FAS. This was fine, but 99% of the time nothing changed, so it was extra load on our FAS servers and didn't do anything. So, we moved things to a central job that listens on fedmsg for events that could cause changes that would apply to our servers and fire off one ansible job to run on all machines. We had a bit of a issue with the ansible-playbook call, but we debugged it back at the hotel before dinner and thought we had it all working.
• The 3pm governance workshop went really well. I was thinking there was going to be some contention, but for the most part folks there agreed on a great deal. Hopefully the proposal that came out of discussions will meet with the wider communities approval as well.
• After a nice dinner at a close place (I was tired of walking) we got back to the hotel only to find out that I had screwed up the fasClient cron job (we had moved it from every 30min to every day as a just in case measure, but I mistakenly had it running every minute during a specific hour). Smooge was around and managed to kill things off and I was able to get in and fix it. If you are a sysadmin that gets emails, I am very sorry for the large volume of emails this generated to you.
• Finally got to sleep around midnight, only to wake up at 3am to get into the cab for the airport. ;)

Another really great flock! I am pretty impressed that everything went so smoothly, especially for those that had to travel in from far away for the conference. Kudos. To all the folks traveling back home in the coming days: safe travels! I'll probably post another wrap up blog in a few days with some thoughts about the entire event too.

The day started out far too early as they seem to be at any flock. The breakfast place in the hotel is not bad. Easy to go there, included in the price of rooms and important early morning coffee. After filling up, time to head over to the conference:

• First up was Pierre's talk on "How I built a github clone in 2 weeks". This was about progit, a small and nice open source replacement for the non free github. Pull requests, tickets, forking repos, etc. There's still much to possibly add, but it's already looking very nice. In the talk some folks had questions about adding it to pkgs somehow, which would allow things like forking a package's repo and submitting pull requests for your fixes to it. Also, possibly a nice place for those people who with to modify a package spec and build it a different way in copr (perhaps as a SCL).
• Right after that I had to rush over to give my talk on Fedora Infrastructure. Hopefully it was entertaining for everyone. I had some nice stats on where we are now, a list of projects we hope to finish soon, a list of projects we hope to finish in the next year or so and finally pointers to joining us and helping out.
• Then off to lunch at the same place we had been eating to fuel up.
• A number of us infrastructure folks then gathered in the open hacking room and worked on various projects. I missed out on Patricks talk about authentication in Fedora, but I hopefully had a good understanding of where we are there. It's pretty awesome that we have such a nice authentication setup now.
• Next up was Smooge's talk on EPEL next. He did a great job going over the history of EPEL and how we got to where we are, then we brainstormed what the problems are and how we could possibly solve them. Very good constructive stuff. :)
• Then, back for more hacking and hallway track.
• I met in person so many people I have only known from IRC I cannot even list them all. ;)
• After things finished up, a group of us headed downtown to wander around and do some curio shopping then some dinner. Dinner was good, but the place was pretty slow. A group split off then to go dancing, but I went back to the hotel via tram.

After a short bit of sleep and pushing of updates for Fedora, over to day 2 of the conference: First up was Review Server. Lots of nice ideas on how to make package reviews less painfull for everyone involved. Lowering the barrier without lowering the quality is a great goal. Next was a introductory talk on ansible by Aditya Patawari. He's been a Fedora infrastructure contributor for a while and I was glad he decided to do this talk. I think it was a nice into for folks that haven't seen ansible in action before. I skipped out on the keynote to discuss more things with the infra team and Lunch. Lunches have so far been pretty good. There's a cafeteria a few blocks away that has a choice of 1 of 2 meals and a drink provided by the conference. Not bad at all. After lunch there was a "meet your FESCo" session. Amazingly all 9 FESCo members were present. I got to meet a few of them in person for the first time. There were  number of questions all over the map, and we managed to keep talking for all our alloted time periood. The rest of the afternoon was spent in the 'hallway track' talking to folks about lots of different things, as well as writing up my slides for my talk tomorrow. The evening event was a boat ride through prague with dinner and drinks. It was great. The top of the boat had lovely views, but also lots of people. We got there a bit early, so some of us spent about 30min walking through the downtown area next to the river. Lots of little shops and street performers and other fun things. The metro/tram/bus system system has been great so far. Despite not reading any of the language, as long as we know the number of the train/tram/bus, the direction and stop to get off we are all fine. Getting tickets has been easy, you can get them at the front desk of the hotel even.

I mananged to get a full nights sleep for once, and after meeting lots of people at breakfast, we headed over to the conference. We were all running a bit late, so we headed to the keynote. It was quite interesting to see how open source interacts with government. It's a segment that open source could really make roads into, but we don't think of it too often. Slowly but surely things are progressing there. After that I went to the 'hall way' track and caught up with infrastructure folks. Very great to catch up with people and go over some things in a high bandwidth way. Also met some more folks I have not met in person, including Hans de Goede, who it turns out was another user of logitech media server and was able to tell me where to find the newer versions that I couldn't find after my recent server review. :) Then on to the 'life of a remotee' talk. I've been working remote for something like 20 years, so I didn't find too much new, but there was a large crowd there, so I think more and more folks are working remotely and are interested in how to be more productive doing that. After that was Luke Macken's talk on the Fedora updates process and bodhi2 improvements. I am really looking forward to deploying bodhi2, which we are hoping for a few weeks after f21 is released. Then things wrapped up for the day and we went to a bar called "The Bar". ;) Finally got back to the hotel late, and pushed the new ansible 1.7 release out to Fedora and EPEL.

This year flock (The yearly Fedora conference) is in Prague. Red Hat has a large office in Brno, not far from Prague, so I came out a few days early in order to meet with some of my co-workers in Brno. Things started with travel, which was quite an adventure. My flight from Denver to Frankfurt was delayed about 95minutes, which meant that I missed the next flight from Frankfurt to Prague, but managed to get rebooked on the next one. Then, that one was also delayed and I just managed to make the bus to Brno from Prague. After the plane, the next plane, the bus and the tram it was something like 36 hours of traveling. Meetings in Brno were great. I was able to see in person some folks that I have only ever talked to via irc or email. I talked with the folks that run the Fedora retrace server and we are  going to be deploying 2 new big servers for them soon that should make abrt much faster and nicer for everyone. We also had some good talks with the developers of Copr, and we are going to be improving storage and adding signing and lots of exciting things there soon. Then tuesday I headed up from Brno to Prague via the train. I love trains, and it was nice to see some of the countryside since we were going during the day. Then a metro ride and the hotel. Finally we had a absolutely lovely dinner at a Lebonese restaurant. We wisely just had them bring us food and everything was very tasty. Tomorrow, flock 2014 starts. Really looking forward to talking with everyone.  

Flock (The yearly Fedora conference) is next week in Prague, Czech Republic. See https://flocktofedora.org for full details. I just thought I would share a few misc notes before folks started their travel to the conference:

• We have a #fedora-flock irc channel on chat.freenode.net open and ready for dicussion, travel questions, folks who can't make it to talk to folks who are there, and anything else flock related. Do join us there.
• A pretty large amount of the Fedora Engineering folks are going to be traveling this weekend and heading to Brno for meetings before flock. If you see a problem or issue in infrastructure and can't find anyone around, PLEASE do file a ticket on it and we will get to it as soon as we can. I am expecting things to be pretty quiet in infrastructure land, as we have been careful to keep changes to a minimum this week.
• If you're sharing posts on social media about flock (and you absolutely should), please use #flocktofedora as your tag. ;)
•  I wish everyone very safe travels and look forward to talking to everyone there!

A few weeks ago my main server lost a disk out of it's raid array. No big deal, I had a (larger than needed) spare around to replace it with. However, I got to thinking it might be about time to get some new disks and do a fresh install. The old disks were 1.5TBx4 in a encrypted/raid5 that I had installed Fedora on back in December 2008 (Fedora 10) and upgraded since then. Moving to a new fresh install would allow me to move to bigger/newer disks, add lvm (I didn't use lvm for some reason on the f10 install), move to newer/better/bigger disk encryption, and also just get rid of a bunch of cruft that had piled up over the years. Side note: Dear wordpress: It's NOT AT ALL NICE when I type out a bunch of text for a post and hit "save draft" and you DELETE a bunch of stuff. (Redoing the rest of this post for the second time, thanks wordpress). Looking at drive prices, it seemed 3TB drives were the good price point, so I picked up 4 of those. I didn't have much chance to mess with them last week as I was out at Fedora's main datacenter doing a bunch of work, but this weekend seemed a good time to get things done. I have a server chassis thats (mostly) identical to my main server box that I use for test machines, so it was easy to pull it's drives, put the new ones in and boot the Fedora 20 netinstall iso from usb. I then ran into 2 anaconda issues: First, I hit what anaconda says was a duplicate of bug 1008137. Poking around, I think this was because all 4 drives are gpt, and because I did /boot as raid1, it wanted to install grub2 to all mbr's, but there was only a 1MB bios boot partition on sda. I couldn't figure any way to get anaconda to make more, so I went and manually made one on each drive. That seemed to get me past that. Then, I hit a duplicate of bug 1040691. This may have been my fault, as I forgot that it's really important which "encrypt this" checkbox you check. There's one when you go into custom partitioning, one on each mount point, and one in the lvm/raid popup. I wanted only the last one of those checked (as I want the entire pv encrypted). With the machine installed, it was time to rsync data and configuration over. Most of my services that run on the bare server were easy to move over: squid, unbound, nsd, mediatomb, dhcpd, radvd. One was a sticking point: I long ago got some slimserver devices, which uses a perl based free media server. They in turn got bought by logitech. Logitech isn't doing much with the server, but there was a open project still developing on it until about last month, when they removed all their rpms and went away. ;( So, I think moving to this new server I am going to setup a beagle bone black with mpd and call it good. After a few days of rsync, my backups and media and other data were copied over. I decided to try and use libvirts live migration on my main virtual machine to cut down on outage time. It took a bit of tweaking to get the new server setup in a way that libvirt was happy to migrate my main guest from the old server: I had to setup a bridged network named the same as the one on the old server, I had to make the hostname NOT the same as the old server, and I had to make a link from the storage path on the old server to the new one. Then, the mirgation started, but it didn't give me progress for some reason. Many hours later it did finish. I also took the chance to resize the guest some (larger). The new server I also moved to use NetworkManager from network, since NM now handles bridges nicely. I was happy to see it was only some minor tweaking to ifcfg files and NM brought up everything just as I wanted. I did run into a small snag when I forgot to enable forwarding on the new server, but that was easily fixed. The swap of the new drives/install into the old server hardware was pretty simple (hot swap bays for the win!). Then, only a few tweaks and everything was up and running on the new install. It was a bit of effort, but it's nice having the new fresh install and setup running along.