FWN/Beats/Announcements

Announcements

Fedora Announcements are the place where you can find the major coverage from the Fedora Project including general announcements, development announcements and Fedora Events.

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Upcoming elections for FAmSCo, FESCo, and the Fedora Board

Fedora Project Leader, Jared K. Smith announced:

"One of the things I like most about Fedora is the orderly way in which people are able to move in and out of leadership positions within our community. Each development cycle, we have a set of elections for the steering committees and for the Fedora Board. The next election cycle is nearly upon us, so I'd like to take this opportunity to share the details of the upcoming elections with you.

As quick reminder, the nomination period for this election cycle will open on 25 October 2011, and will close promptly on 5 November 2011 at 23:59:59 UTC. The full elections schedule, along with more details about the elections, can be found at

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections

I strongly encourage you to consider running for an open position in one of the elections. This is one way to serve your fellow community members and help move Fedora forward at the same time. Additionally, I'm looking for a few volunteers to help with the coordination of the candidate questionnaires and town hall meetings. If you're willing to help, please let me know.

Fedora Board

This election cycle will fill two elected seats for the Board (seats E1 and E2). Prior to the election I will also announce the first of two appointed seat in this cycle (seats A1 and A2), with the second appointment announcement to follow after the election. For more information on nominations, and the process refer to:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board_nominations
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Elections
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/History

FESCo

This cycle will also see four candidates elected to open seats in the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. For information on the nominations and elections:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FESCo_election_policy
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Development/SteeringCommittee/Nominations

FAmSCo

This election cycle will also see candidates elected to fill all all seven seats on the Fedora Ambassadors Steering Committee. For more information, refer to:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAmSCo_election_rules
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAmSCo_elections
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAmSCo_election_2011_nominations

Candidate Questionnaire and Town Hall meetings

Additionally, the nomination period also serves as the time for the community to present questions to be posed to candidates. If you wish to ask questions to be answered by candidates, you can add them. Candidates will have the questions posed to them and responses made available to the community before the voting period begins.

As we get closer to the elections, we will try to schedule several Town Hall Meetings in IRC to help you get to know the candidates better, and to ask them additional questions.

As always, I'm thankful to those who have given their time, talents, and abilities to serve the Fedora community.

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Subsidy requests for FUDCon Blacksburg are now OOOOOPEN!

Robyn Bergeron announced

"Greetings, FUDCon friends, near and far:

As you are probably aware, the 2012 North American FUDCon will be held in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the campus of Virginia Tech. If you are planning on attending, it's never too early to pre-register, and to start thinking about your travel plans. FUDCon Blacksburg will take place January 13-15, 2012.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Blacksburg_2012

I'm happy to announce that we are officially accepting subsidy requests for travel to Blacksburg. If you are requesting a subsidy, we just have a few steps that we ask you to follow:

1: Register on the FUDCon: Blacksburg wiki page in the pre-registration area. 2: Put an X in the $$$ column. 3: Create a funding request ticket in the FUDCon trac

General information about being sponsored can be found at:

• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sponsoring_event_attendees

Requests are processed in a first-come, first-served manner, though generally prioritization is giving to local travel over international travel first. Requests will be reviewed by fellow Fedora community members at FUDCon subsidy request meetings over the next few weeks.

The first subsidy meeting will take place on Wednesday, November 9th. The time and IRC channel will be announced as we approach that day.

As always, participation both in planning as well as subsidy granting is ALWAYS welcome. Please join us on the fudcon-planning mailing list for information about meetings, as well as for general FUDCon updates, and see the "meetings" section of your FUDCon's wiki page for meeting information.

Mailing list:

• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fudcon-planning

FUDCon Blacksburg Meetings:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Blacksburg_2012#Meetings"

Subject: IMPORTANT: Mandatory password and ssh key change by 2011-11-30

Kevin Fenzi announced:

"All existing users of the Fedora Account System (FAS) are required to change their password and upload a NEW ssh public key before 2011-11-30. Failure to do so may result in your account being marked inactive. Passwords changed and NEW ssh public keys uploaded after 2011-10-10 will meet this requirement.

Backgound and reasoning:

This change event has NOT been triggered by any specific compromise or vulnerability in Fedora Infrastructure. Rather, we believe, due to the large number of high profile sites with security breaches in recent months, that this is a great time for all Fedora contributors and users to review their security settings and move to "best practices" on their machines. Additionally, we are putting in place new rules for passwords to make them harder to guess.

New Password Rules:

• Nine or more characters with lower and upper case letters, digits and

 punctuation marks.

• Ten or more characters with lower and upper case letters and digits.
• Twelve or more characters with lower case letters and digits
• Twenty or more characters with all lower case letters.
• No maximum length.

Some Do's and Don'ts:

• NEVER store your ssh private key on a shared or public system.
• ALWAYS use a strong passphrase on your ssh key.
• If you must store passwords, use an application specifically for this

 purpose like revelation, gnome-keyring, seahorse, or keepassx. 

• Regularly apply your operating system's security related updates.
• Only use ssh agent forwarding when needed ( .ssh/config:

 "ForwardAgent no") 

• DO verify ssh host keys via dnssec protected dns. ( .ssh/config:

 "VerifyHostKeyDNS yes")

• DO consider a seperate ssh key for Fedora Infrastructure.
• Work with and use security features like SELinux and iptables.
• Review the Community Standard Infrastructure security document (link

 below)

Q&A:

Q: My password and ssh private key are fine and secure! Can't I just skip this change?

No. We believe the new guidelines above provide an added measure of security compared to the previous requirements. We want all users of our infrastructure to follow the new guidelines to improve one aspect of security across the systems they share. Awareness is also an aspect of good security. By requiring these changes, we also hope to maintain and improve awareness of the process for changing passwords and keys.

Q: Can I just change my password and re-upload my same ssh public key? Or upload a bogus ssh public key and then re-upload my old one?

A: No. We've installed safeguards to ensure that your new ssh public key is different from your old one. Additionally, some of our contributors may have had accounts on compromised high profile Linux sites recently, and we want to make sure no ssh private keys or passwords used in Fedora Infrastructure were obtained via those incidents.

Q: This is a hassle. How often is this going to happen?

A: The last mass password change in Fedora was more than 3 years ago. Absent a triggering event, these mass changes will be infrequent.

Q: The new password length requirements/rules are too strict. How will I remember passwords that are that long?

A: You can employ a password storage application (see above), or use a method like diceware (see below), or construct a memorable sentence or phrase.

Q: How do I generate a new ssh key? How do I use it for just Fedora hosts?

A: See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cryptography and use a ~/.ssh/config file to match fedoraproject.org hosts for that key.

Q: I never uploaded a ssh key to the Fedora Account System, nor am I in a group that needs one, do I still have to upload a new one?

A: No. If you don't have a ssh public key uploaded or desire to do so, you can just change your password.

More reading:

• http://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/csi/security-policy/en-US/html-single/
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_mass_password_update
• http://xkcd.com/936/
• http://www.iusmentis.com/security/passphrasefaq/
• http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cryptography

Outage: value server migration - 2011-10-13 20:30UTC

Kevin Fenzi announced:

" There will be an outage starting at 2011-10-13 20:30 UTC, which will

last approximately 1 hour.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at
or run:

date -d '2011-10-13 20:30 UTC'

Reason for outage:

We are migrating smolt and zodbot over to new RHEL6 server instances.

Affected Services:

• Smolt - http://smolts.org/
• zodbot irc bot.

Unaffected Services:

• BFO - http://boot.fedoraproject.org/
• Bodhi - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/
• Buildsystem - http://koji.fedoraproject.org/
• GIT / Source Control
• DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org
• Docs - http://docs.fedoraproject.org/
• Email system
• Fedora Account System - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
• Fedora Community - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/community/
• Fedora Hosted - https://fedorahosted.org/
• Fedora Insight - https://insight.fedoraproject.org/
• Fedora People - http://fedorapeople.org/
• Fedora Talk - http://talk.fedoraproject.org/
• Main Website - http://fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror List - https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/
• Mirror Manager - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mirrormanager/
• Package Database - https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/
• Spins - http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
• Start - http://start.fedoraproject.org/
• Torrent - http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/
• Translation Services - http://translate.fedoraproject.org/
• Wiki - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

Ticket Link:

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/2971

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or add comments to the ticket for this outage above."

Results of the voting for the Fedora 17 release name

Fedora Project Leader, Jared K. Smith announced:

"The voting has concluded for the Fedora 17 release name, and the results are in! Thank you to the Fedora community members who made name suggestions and participated in the voting.

The Fedora 17 release name is: Beefy Miracle

Voting period: Tuesday 2011-11-04 00:00:00 UTC to Monday 2011-10-10 23:59:59 UTC

Number of valid ballots cast: 292

Using the range voting method, each release name candidate could attain a maximum of (292*8) = 2336 votes.

Results:

Votes :: Name

---

1182 :: Beefy Miracle
1035 :: Liege
 881 :: Never
 791 :: Gernsback
 641 :: Rocky Ripple
 628 :: Alpharabius
 550 :: Panguipulli
 505 :: Tubeteika

-- Jared Smith Fedora Project Leader"

Announcing the release of Fedora 16 Beta!!

Dennis Gilmore announced:

"Mark your calendars, and get ready to go exploring: The release of Fedora 16, codenamed "Verne," is scheduled for release in early November. Fedora is the leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to bring everyone fresh, innovative features with each release, delighting users worldwide every six months.

We are proud to announce the availability of the Beta release of Fedora 16.

Come see why we love Fedora so much. We are betting you will, too. Download it now:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease?anF16b

What is the Beta Release?

The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 16. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general release of Fedora 16 in early November. We invite you to join us in making Fedora 16 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback.

Of course, this is a beta release, meaning that some problems may still be lurking. A list of the problems we already know about is found at the Common F16 bugs page, seen here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs

Features

This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free software. Examples include:

• System Boot. Fedora 16 introduces GRUB2, the long-awaited

next-generation boot-loader for Linux. GRUB2 automatically recognizes other operating systems, supports LVM2 and LUKS partitions, and is more customizable than the previous version. In this release, only x86 systems with a BIOS uses GRUB2 by default. Work is ongoing for making GRUB2 the default for other architectures and systems.

• Services Management. Fedora 15 introduced the Systemd services

management program. This release features better integration of Systemd via conversion to native systemd services from legacy init scripts in many software components -- for desktop users, this means faster boot times; for system administrators it means more powerful management of services.

• Desktop Updates. The two major desktop environments have been

updated to the latest releases: KDE Software Compilation 4.7 and GNOME 3.1 development release.

• SELinux Enhancements. SELinux policy package now includes a

pre-built policy that will only rebuild policy if any customizations have been made. A sample test run shows 4 times speedup on installing the package from 48 Seconds to 12 Seconds and max memory usage from 38M to 6M. In addition to that, SELinux file name transition allows better policy management. For instance, policy writers can take advantage of this and write a policy rule that states, if a SELinux unconfined process creates a file named resolv.conf in a directory labelled etc_t, the file should get labeled appropriately. This results is less chances of mislabeled files. Also, from this release onwards, selinuxfs is mounted at /sys/fs/selinux instead of in /selinux. All the affected components including anaconda, dracut, livecd-tools and policycoreutils have been modified to work with this change.

• System Accounts. Fedora now standardizes on login.defs as

authority for UID/GID space allocation, and has moved boundary between system and user accounts from 500 to 1000 to match conventions followed by several other Linux distributions. Upgrading from a existing release will not be affected by this change and you can use kickstart to override this change during installation if necessary.

• HAL Removal. HAL, a hardware abstraction layer which has been a

deprecated component for several releases, has been completely removed from all Fedora spins and DVD. Software components using HAL have moved over to using udisks and upower as well as libudev for device discovery. This results in faster system bootup and faster startup for applications depending on device discovery.

• Cloud Updates. Fedora now includes a number of new and improved

features to support cloud computing, including HekaFS, a "cloud ready" version of GlusterFS, including additional auth*/crypto/multi-tenancy; pacemaker-cloud, application service high availability in a cloud environment; and IaaS implementations such as Aeolus and OpenStack.

• Virtualization. Once again Fedora raises the bar on

virtualization support, including expanded virtual network support, an improved Spice for managing virtual machines, restored Xen support, a new virtual machine lock manager, and improved ability to browse guest file systems.

• Developer Improvements. Developers get many goodies with Verne,

including updated Ada, Haskell and Perl environments, a new Python plugin for GCC and a number of new and improved APIs.

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all the new features in Fedora 16 is available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/16/FeatureList

We have nightly composes of alternate spins available here:

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/

Contributing to Fedora

For more information on common and known bugs, tips on how to report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the release notes:

• http://docs.fedoraproject.org

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!"

Fedora Development News

The Development Announcement list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements

• Policy or process changes that affect developers.
• Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
• Tools changes that affect developers.
• Schedule changes
• Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements

• Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
• Discussion
• Anything else not mentioned above

Remaining F16 blockers and F16 planning (2011-10-26)

Adam Williamson announced:

"Hey, folks. This mail brought to you by my ever-increasing empty liquor bottle collection and ever-receding hairline.

We unfortunately still have open blockers today, which means we will likely do a TC3 compose tonight instead of RC1. The remaining unaddressed blockers are:

1. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=668282 "PackageKit yum backend uses incorrect encoding for dynamic category names, makes them show up with '?' characters in KPackageKit"

Nils reported that he would complete work on this today, but has not checked in today at all. This leaves us somewhat stuck, as only Richard Hughes and Nils are really qualified to work on this. Richard is away this week.

2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=731245 "KDE fails to start inside a VM , large amount of memory [@ miCopyRegion]"

Soren fixed the initial issue, but KDE on qxl still doesn't really work correctly. Details and logs are in the latest comments on the bug, and I'm currently uploading a live image for convenient reproduction. Again, contributions are welcome here.

3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=736893 "New Install of Fedora 16 TC1 on iBFT iSCSI NIC fails on first reboot"

Again, we're still rather looking for information from the reporter here. Tim may be able to acquire an iBFT NIC for testing today.

4. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=748747 "Totem doesn't display video when using software 3D rendering"

Did not hear from ajax in relation to this bug today. Again, we really need development input on this one.

5. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=747377 "heap corruption via multi-threaded "git grep""

This is the bug in glibc 12.999 and 13 which can at least potentially cause just about any app to crash. We're in the middle of addressing it; a fixed glibc is out for testing and we are now mass-rebuilding all packages which hit stable since glibc 12.999 made it to the buildroot. This, obviously, isn't speeding up the whole release process any.

Thanks everyone! -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net"

New bodhi bugfix release in production

Luke Macken announced:

"======bodhi v0.8.3======

Yesterday I pushed out a new bugfix release of bodhi into production. The bodhi-client is currently on it's way to updates-testing for all releases.

• https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates

I raced to get this out before the infrastructure freeze today, and since then there have already been many more bugfixes in git, so expect another release shortly after F16 is released.

Please file bugs here

Client fixes

• bodhi -L dies with out-of-range exception after branching f16

• bodhi -r dist-f14 -b 676195 don't respect -r option

Server fixes

• Default to update ID-based URLs

• fedora-easy-karma submits too many comments to bodhi when bodhi has a server problem (edit)

• Bodhi no longer adds comments to Security Response bugs

Buildroot override fixes

• Buildroot overrides require commit access to devel branch rather than branch override applies to

• Cannot request build root override

• buildroot overrides stay after expiration date

Masher fixes

• Updates-testing report emails should use package names not update number

• Current updateinfo data is broken (epoch="None")

• Fedora Update System suggests to reboot when not asked to do so

Package fixes

---

• bodhi-server should require python-fedora-turbogears

last stable push for f16 GA

Dennis Gilmore announced:

"Hi all,

on Monday October 24 we will be doing the last push to stable, after that the only things that will get pushed to stable before GA will be things that have been accepted as release blockers.

Thanks

Release Engineering"

F16 Final Change Deadline is Monday, Oct. 24

Robyn Bergeron announced:

"Greetings,

This is your friendly reminder that the Final Change Deadline for F16 is Monday, October 24, 2011.

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Change_deadlines

"After the change deadlines for the Final release no more updates are made to the branched development repository (e.g. /pub/fedora/linux/development/16).

The only exceptions are accepted blocker and "nice to have" bugs:

• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_blocker_bug_process
• https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_nth_bug_process

All updates after this time are considered zero day updates of the release, and are pushed to the updates repository which is available on the public availability date. For example, the repository for Fedora 16 is /pub/fedora/linux/updates/16."

The next step in the process is to create a final release candidate (RC) to pass on to QA for testing as soon as possible. The RC is scheduled to be created on Tuesday, October 25. Outstanding blocker bugs can delay the creation of the RC, possibly resulting in a one-week slip of the schedule.

Current outstanding blocker bugs can be seen here

Thanks, Robyn"

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning. Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding. In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events (September - December 2011)

• North America (NA)
• Central & South America (LATAM):
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
• India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Past Events

Archive of Past Fedora Events

Additional information

• Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
• Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
• Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
• Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
• Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
• LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.