Resetting expectations: Fedora Infrastructure Changes

Over many years, I have found that Infrastructure is very much like a rose garden. Roses grow fairly well by themselves, but soon can entangle up with each other into quite a knotted patch (judging from the garden I have left to its own devices for the last 4 years). I have very pretty flowers all spring, summer and fall long, but every now and then you have to do a large amount of pruning or it all falls apart as things age out. The amazing thing with roses is you can prune them down to the bare essentials and in a season they will be producing flowers again.

To continue the analogy, my current job is to be the temporary head gardener while we look for someone who can do the job as well as the last fellow. The garden has grown from having good volunteer gardeners come in and put in various plants. Now sometimes the gardener then has to go somewhere else, and sometimes the plant gets away from them. In either case, we have a bunch of plants that look pretty but are taking too much time in how they are currently planted. And so its time to prune them so that they can either grow anew or something better can be planted in its place.

In order to prune stuff, I have looked at the following:

1. Do we currently have experts inside of the project working on the software to make it better.
2. Is there someone doing this better than we can do on our own using the same criteria we use (FLOSS software, open development, etc).
3. Is keeping it in-house pulling away from core Fedora services and tasks we would like to accomplish.
4. There is nothing wrong with paying others who do great stuff with FLOSS software especially when paying supports those projects.

This came up with a list of items that we have but aren't getting much love, require a lot of work (eg volunteer help has to be supplemented by full-time people), and could be better housed somewhere else:

1. translate.fedoraproject.org. Transifex software is what is used there, and has a very active upstream at transifex.net. Currently the version we are using is considered dead-software and the version we have slowly gotten onto our staging servers is soon to be dead soon. With many other projects already moving their documents to the upstream servers, transifex.net, this looks to be a good candidate to move out of our infrastructure.
2. blogs.fedoraproject.org. The blogging software we are using is Wordpress-MU which again has an active upstream that we are multiple versions behind (Ricky Z spends his time back-porting security fixes). The service also does not get that much use and the blogs there would be better off at WordPress.
3. talk.fedoraproject.org. The asterisk server gets about 8 phone calls a month. It is a very ancient version and it seems a continual effort to keep up with the upstream.
4. zarafa. While housing email and calendering for various sub-projects does have value... it also brings up all kinds of security and compliance issues (compared to dealing with email lists).
5. various mailing lists. There have been a lot of projects with a lot of mailing lists opened. But they haven't taken off and are just waiting for some sort of spam agent to sign up and use us to drop links. This one is easy for us to deal with. We can contact owners and close off lists that aren't in use anymore.
6. cleaning out old system administrators. We have had a lot of good people come into infrastructure and then that cruel mistress, Real Life, has at some point taken them away again. Removing people from system administration groups who have not logged in for 60 days is a way to make sure we lower security risks.

Now usually after a post like this occurs, we get a bunch of volunteers who will say "We can take this over." I am asking people not to do this, because frankly volunteering under pressure usually means leaving when the pressure is gone. We have gone this route several times before, and its not something I think is sustainable.

We will look for volunteers who can replant the services, document them, build out a staging and production service and train OTHER volunteers on them so that any replacement service has a chance of lasting.

Resetting expectations: Fedora Edited Planet Feed

It would seem that somehow people are misunderstanding the intent of the edited planet.

1. It is not replacing the regular planet feed.
2. There is no requirement that a Fedora user HAS to be on the edited feed. I am not.
3. This is not a top-down mandated item but very much bottom up.

A contributor (averi) wanted to know why we didn't have a focused on Fedora feed like other organizations. We don't because no one has stepped up to do so. Averi volunteered to do this and did all the grunt work to set it up.

And in less than a week it has become some sort of conspiracy removing the voice of Fedorans and various other bull.. I am upset and angry and really just tired of it all.

Good night.

Thankyou tatica

If all goes well, then I will have my first hackergotchi. It was taken by the very talented tatica. I am going through her blip tv blogs so I can learn gimp photo editing. Hopefully it will get my lego-video jump started.

Watch Darth McGrath become a true Sith (or an Eminem clone.. not sure which).

FUDcon NA 2011 ... Post thoughts

So my part of FUDcon is over, and I want to thank our hosts at the Arizona State University and our co-ordinators Robyn Bergeron and Ryan Rix. At the end of the talks and meetings I ended up with a lot of lose ends.

1. There were several questions I was asked at my short term lightening talk about the Monday security item. I had to run to another item and did not find them afterwords to discuss better why the reporting method was used and what was told. I apologize and will try to find out who you were to talk later.
2. Somehow I not only left my coat at FUDcon but also the new long-sleeved Mr Hot Dog shirt I had bought from Brand X shirts 20 minutes before.
3. I get cranky a lot more than I should be around people after 3 days of no sleep.

FUDcon {Day -4 => Day 3 }

Sunday: Work over what netapp infrastructure changes need to happen on Monday.

Monday: Help a user with an account issue. Clean up and find various items. Spend Monday night moving to new Netapp infrastructure. We have lots more fast storage.

Tuesday: Go through audit logs (selinux + auditd for the win). Centralized logging of items really helps.

Wednesday: Pack. Try to decide if I want to blog about detrimental blog posts. Decide that lack of sleep has made me rather hostile and peeved.

Thursday: Try to fly out but have to wait for snow bound plane to get things done. Get to Phoenix and find that servers knew I was coming. Spend afternoon and night fixing boxes.

Friday: Go to collocation. Prove that IBM Power computers HATE me. Long story short... Power system A has never worked. Power system B stops working. Power system A starts to work and I am so happy. Try to fix system B and system A stops working. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Saturday: Lots of cool talks. All of the ones that I wanted to attend keep getting done at the same time. But I have lots of fun. Spend evening trying to find vegetarian food for other people. FUDpub was fun but I am not really good with crowds anymore so spent evening working out items.

Sunday: Got to morning presentations and found that many of the items I wanted to do were all at the same time. Ended up doing a quick infrastructure meeting and a talk on Fedora Engineering next big things. Then spent a but load of time working on what blue sky governance issues we could deal with.. [this was started by Toshio and it was cool that a lot of things I wanted were similar. After we got 10 other people on it though we ended up with something else.. but ok.] Spent the evening reading/writing infrastructure issues and then playing some board games.

To Do Monday: Hope to meet with Cristoph Wickert to clarify communication problems I have had and clarify points. Got 1 infrastructure meeting, 1 board meeting, and 3 other meetings. My luck they will all be at the same time.

Thank you to Google and RackSpace for providing various events. It really helped get me working on 2-4 hours sleep.

Things I wish I had time to do:

• Learn scribus
• Learn gimp (tatica did a cool tutorial.. will have to watch the video)
• Learn inkscape
• Figure out how to fix EPEL.

American Generations

Sometimes I wake up at 2 am, and can't get back to sleep because of some silly question my brain has posed. This week was "What is Generation X really versus the Baby Boomers... and should they really be X or should we be Y or U." I guess it came from all the press coverage that people born from 1946 til 1964 were Baby Boomers and after that were Generation X. Now the name "Generation X" seems to have been chosen out of the air but is it appropriate and what years would it cover.

Now first off, I think Generation X etc is silly because we should start counting back to when people came over the Bering Straights N thousands of years ago. But since this Generation thing is "American European based" I will focus on that.

Actually what I will do is say every generation lasts 18 years, and that baby boomers were generation W, then generation X, then Y. Backing up we get a list of the alphabet like this.

Generation:  A 1550 -> 1567
Generation:  B 1568 -> 1585
Generation:  C 1586 -> 1603
Generation:  D 1604 -> 1621
Generation:  E 1622 -> 1639
Generation:  F 1640 -> 1657
Generation:  G 1658 -> 1675
Generation:  H 1676 -> 1693
Generation:  I 1694 -> 1711
Generation:  J 1712 -> 1729
Generation:  K 1730 -> 1747
Generation:  L 1748 -> 1765
Generation:  M 1766 -> 1783
Generation:  N 1784 -> 1801
Generation:  O 1802 -> 1819
Generation:  P 1820 -> 1837
Generation:  Q 1838 -> 1855
Generation:  R 1856 -> 1873
Generation:  S 1874 -> 1891
Generation:  T 1892 -> 1909
Generation:  U 1910 -> 1927
Generation:  V 1928 -> 1945
Generation:  W 1946 -> 1963
Generation:  X 1964 -> 1981
Generation:  Y 1982 -> 1999
Generation:  Z 2000 -> 2017

This does work because the "first" generations of children being born in European colonies (that lasted) in North America are known to have been after 1560. Now the question is what to call the generation after 2017? AA?

Anyway.. I think I can get a good nights sleep finally.

FUDcon NA 2011... Gaming

So today I was reminded that FUDcon was 10 days from now. WHAT 10 days?!?!!?!

Last year I ran a D&D event on the last night of the Con which went ok.. but I really wanted to do better this year. I have had all these ideas in my head about what to do, but it would seem putting them off for other things. [And spending 2 hours learning the Neverwinter Nights editor to map out the town doesn't really count because I just went and played NWN instead.] Ok so what to do, what to do...


Well first thing, what is the idea? Since it will be all levels of players I would like a prewritten module in the style of the ones that I played as a youth.

• A4. In the Dungeons of the Slavelords
• T1. Village of Hommlet.
• U1. Sinister Secret of Saltmarth

And secondly, about the game systems.. there are several "open source" games but none that I am really familiar with enough to teach others with. Plus the fact as a game designer, I am always ending up fiddling with the bits here and there. Of the semi-open source games, D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder seems to be the best out there. [I doubt the OGL could pass the Debian legal test so I figure it is semi-open.] So the module will be written up using the D&D 3.5 SRD and some mayonnaise from Pathfinder.

Then I remembered.. hey wait... I need players and they might want to play something specific... so its time to ask. [It puts me off writing anything for another 24-48 hours :).]