PTO

I realized I had some PTO (Paid time off, basically what used to be called 'vacation') that I needed to use before it disappeared, so I have planned a number of vacation days in the coming month. Including 2 in this last week. :)

I'll also point to an old post of mine about what I personally think about vacations/pto when you are working in a community: time off when you are paid to work in a community

The biggest things for me about this isn't completely disconnecting or ignoring everything, in fact most days I get up at the same time (cats have to be fed!) and sit at my laptop like I usually do, but it's that I don't have to attend meetings, and I can do things I fully enjoy. Sometimes thats still working in the community, but sometimes its like what I did on friday: Look into a battery backup for house and tradeoffs/ideas around that. In the end I decided not to do anything right now, but I had fun learning about it.

My next pto days are next thursday ( 2025-02-20 ) then next friday is a "recharge" day at Red Hat, then I have monday off ( 2025-02-24 ), then march 6th and 7th and finally march 11th.

Datacenter Move

More detailed planning is ramping up for me. I have been working on when and how to move particular things, how to shuffle resources around and so forth. I plan to work on my doc more next week and then open things up to feedback from everyone who wants to provide it.

A few things to note about this move:

• There's going to be a week (tenatively in may) where we do the 'switcharoo'. That is, take down services in IAD2 and bring them up in RDU3. This is going to be disruptive, but I'm hoping we can move blocks of things each day and avoid too much outage time. It's going to be disruptive, but we will try to minimize that.

• Once the switcharoo week is over and we are switched, there will be either no staging env at all, or a limited one. This will persist until hardware has been shipped from IAD2 to RDU3 and we can shuffle things around to bring staging entirely back up.

• Once all this is over, we will be in a much better place and with much newer/faster hardware and I might sleep for a month. :)

riscv secondary koji

Slow progress being made. Thanks to some help from abompard auth is now working correctly. It was of course a dumb typo I made in a config, causing it to try and use a principal that didn't exist. OOps. Now, I just need to finish the compose host, then sort out keytabs for builders and hopefully the riscv SIG can move forward on populating it and next steps.

AI

Oh no! This blog has AI in it? Well, not really. I wanted to talk about something from this past week thats AI related, but first, some background. I personally think AI does have some good / interesting uses if carefully crafted for that use. It's a more usefull hype cycle than say cryptocoins or blockchain or 'web3', but less usefull than virtual machines, containers or clouds. Like absolutely anything else, when someone says "hey, lets add this AI thing here" you have to look at it and decide if it's actually worth doing. I think my employer, Red Hat, has done well here. We provide tools for running your own AI things, we try and make open source AI models and tools, we add it in limited ways where it actually makes sense to existing tools ( ansible lightspeed, etc).

Recently, Christian Schaller posted his regular 'looking ahead' desktop blog post. He's done this many times in the past to highlight desktop things his team is hoping to work on. It's great information. In this post: looking ahead to 2025 and fedora workstation and jobs on offer he had a small section on AI. If you haven't seen it, go ahead and read it. It's short and at the top of the post. ;)

Speaking for myself, I read this as the same sort of approach that Red Hat is taking. Namely, work on Open source AI tooling and integrations, provide those for users that want to build things with them, see if there's any other places that could make sense to add an integration points.

I've seen a number of people read this as "Oh no, they are shoving AI in all parts of Fedora now, I'm going to switch to another distro". I don't think that is at all the case. Everything here is being done the Open Source way. If you don't care to use those tools, don't. If AI integration is added it will be in the open and after tradeoffs and feedback about being able to completely disable it.

ansible lint

We had setup ansible-lint to run on our ansible playbooks years ago. Unfortunately, due to a bug it was always saying "ok". We fixed that a while back and now it's running, but it has some kind of opinionated ideas on how things should be. The latest case of this was names. It wants any play name to start with a capitol letter. Handlers in ansible are just plays that get notified when another thing changes. If you change the name of say "restart httpd" to 'Restart httpd" in the handler, you have to then change every single place that is notified too. This caused an anoying mess for a few weeks. Hopefully we have them all changed now but this rule seems a bit random to me.

fedmsg retirement

In case you didn't see it, we finally retired our old fedmsg bus! We switched to fedora-messaging a while back, but kept a bridge between them to keep both sides working. With the retirement of the old github2fedmsg service we were finally able to retire it.

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

comments? additions? reactions?

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