CPE is hiring

Wednesday , 5, May 2021 Rich Bowen announcement Leave a comment

The Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short, is the Red Hat team combining IT and release engineering from Fedora and CentOS. Our goal is to keep core servers and services running and maintained, build releases, and other strategic tasks that need more dedicated time than volunteers can give.

See our wiki page here for more information: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/cpe/

We are hiring new talent to come work full time on Fedora and CentOS. The following positions are now open:

  • LATAM-based Associate / Engineer level, perfect for someone new to the industry or someone early in their career. We are looking for an infrastructure focused hire.

  • Associate / Engineer level in India. This is more a software engineering / DevOps focused role, perfect for graduates or people early in their career.

  • EMEA-based Associate Manager. We are looking for a people focused Manager to join our team to help with the people management workload. This is perfect for aspiring managers looking to move into their first management role or for anybody early in their people management career.

Please note that due to a constraint in how the jobs system works, a single country is nominated for the advertisement. Please kindly ignore that, two of the roles are available in the geographical regions outlined above.

We are looking forward to meeting you and hopefully working with you soon!

CentOS Community Newsletter, May 2021 (#2105)

Tuesday , 4, May 2021 Rich Bowen Newsletter Leave a comment

Hello, friends,

It's been another busy month in the CentOS Project, so we'll get straight to the news:

CentOS Stream News

Last week, Brian Stinson announced some updates on the progress towards CentOS Stream 9 on the centos-devel mailing list.

This included the availability of Stream 9 packages on Gitlab, and a koji instance where you can watch package build activity.

And on Thursday we announced that the CentOS Stream 9 compose infrastructure is available at https://composes.stream.centos.org/ if you want to try out very early builds of CentOS Stream 9.

If you're interested in contributing to CentOS Stream, you should start by registering for a Gitlab account.  We're in the process of updating the contributor guide, and that should be posted soon. Follow the centos-devel mailing list, and @CentOS on Twitter, to be the first to find out the next updates.

CentOS Dojo, May 13-14

The schedule for the upcoming CentOS Dojo is now posted. We'll be featuring two days of technical presentations around the CentOS project and community, including an "Ask me anything" session with the board of directors.

Other sessions include:

Thursday, May 13

  • New authentication platform for CentOS and SIGs
  •  What's new in FreeIPA 4.9
  •  Contributing to the CentOS Stream Kernel
  •  CentOS Stream on Desktop or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love LTS
  • Hyperscale SIG update

Friday, May 14th

  • Board AMA
  • Keeping track of CentOS infrastructure deployments with Ansible and ARA
  • Thinking About Binary Compatibility and CentOS Stream
  • CentOS Stream CI: current state and future plans
  • Hands-on building an AMI pipeline using CentOS Stream 8 and cloud-init

Complete schedule and abstracts are available on the event site. The event will be online, and you will need to register (Free!) on the event website to attend. See you there!

@CentOSProject is now @CentOS

For the past few years, there have been two separate Twitter accounts for CentOS project news - @CentOS and @CentOSProject - and this has led to some confusion. We're pleased to announce that we've consolidated at @CentOS. If you were already following @CentOSProject, you've been automatically moved over to the @CentOS account. The @CentOSProject account will remain as a placeholder just pointing over to the official account.

Meanwhile, if you were following @CentOS to hear from Karanbir Singh, our long-time project lead, that account has been converted to @KaranOrg, where you can follow KB's technical musings and other thoughts around his work and life.

Board nominations open

As you may have seen in the April board meeting minutes, two directors have decided not to run for the upcoming board term. Both of these directors - Karsten and Carl - have served on the board for 8 years, and we have appreciated their service and dedication to the project.

That leaves two seats to be filled in the upcoming term. As per our governance documents, the board selects replacement directors. But the community is asked for nominations for these seats. If you're thinking of someone you think would be a good board member, or if you'd like to nominate yourself, please have a look at the requirements and responsibilities of a director, to see if this is something you (or the proposed candidate) would be willing to commit to. Then, submit your nomination via this Google Form. Thanks!

We're excited at the prospect of bringing new members, with new enthusiasm, to the board, even as we say a fond farewell to long-serving directors, and we look forward to your nominations.

Code of Conduct

We have been working with the Fedora project to draft a new code of conduct, and this was announced a few weeks ago. We expect to implement our version of it shortly after Fedora publishes theirs. We intend to take their final version and make necessary edits (ie, replacing 'Fedora' with 'CentOS' and other related changes) and are therefore waiting until they are done with all proposed edits. We welcome your comments on the centos-devel mailing list over the coming weeks as we prepare to make this change.

Red Hat Summit

Last week we were at Red Hat Summit, Red Hat's annual convention. CentOS had a steady stream of visitors in the CentOS/Fedora booth - thank you to all of you who came and talked with us.

There were a couple of sessions specifically about CentOS Stream - two "Ask the expert" sessions where attendees could ask their burning questions around CentOS Stream. These were very similar sessions, presented twice to make them convenient for people in different time zones. These were recorded, and you can watch them now, with free registration on the Summit platform.

CentOS Stream: Building an innovative future for enterprise Linux

If you have further questions about CentOS Stream, we encourage you to bring them to the centos-devel mailing list, or any of our various social media presences.

SIG reports

CentOS Special Interest Groups are smaller efforts around particular topics or technologies, to produce content on top of the base CentOS operating system. This month we have reports from a few of our SIGs.

Messaging SIG

Purpose

Provide a unique source for messaging related packages. These packages are consumed e.g by the Cloud SIG or the OpsTools SIG.

Membership Update

We had talks with the RabbitMQ maintainers to get RabbitMQ packages included and updated.

Activity

Other than that, the nature of this SIG is to provide ... for other SIGs. The churn is not as big as in other SIGs.

Storage SIG

Repository Status and Updates

GlusterFS 9 was released; the glusterfs-9.1 bug fix update is available.

Ceph Pacific/16 was released; the ceph-16.2.1 bug fix update is available (c8 and c8s).

Bug fix updates to NFS-Ganesha (including libntirpc), Ceph Octopus/15, Ceph Nautilus/14 (c7 and c8), and Gluster 8 are available.

Ceph Pacific, GlusterFS 8 and GlusterFS 9, and NFS-Ganesha 3 (including libntirpc) packages are now built for CentOS 8 Stream. The associated release packages for those will land in CentOS 8 Stream soon.

Group Status and Actions from meeting

The storage sig meeting is moved to #centos-meeting2

Ceph Pacific is now available and can be consumed by other projects:

The OpenStack TripleO CI now consumes cephadm Pacific for both released and pending content -
https://review.opendev.org/q/topic:%22cephadm_pacific%22+(status:open%20OR%20status:merged)

Links and other general informations

Meetings agenda https://hackmd.io/Epc35JIESaeotoGzwu5R5w

 

Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors for 2021-04-14

Thursday , 29, April 2021 Rich Bowen Board minutes Leave a comment

Quorum and started at :05

Directors in attendance were:

  • Karanbir Singh (Chair)
  • Johnny Hughes
  • Jim Perrin
  • Tru Huynh
  • Karsten Wade
  • Pat Riehecky
  • Mike McLean
  • Brian Exelbierd (Red Hat Liaison)

Others in attendance:

  • Rich Bowen (Community Manager, stand-in Secretary)
  • Amy Marrich
  • Alfredo Moralejo
  • Matthias Runge
  • Josh Boyer
  • Davide Cavalca
  • Paul Isaac’s
  • Aoife Moloney
  • Brian Stinson

A welcome was given to guest Josh Boyer, representing RHEL engineering interests.

Topic: Board reappointment, and nomination of new directors

  • Open discussion should take place on public lists, with clear expectations that the vote happens in the board meeting, but that discussion, and nominations, are welcome from the community
  • Discussion of staggering (6 month offset for half of the directors) vs 12 months?
  • Two directors have indicated a desire to step down - Karsten Wade and Carl Trieloff - and need to be replaced. Their term as Directors will end effective April 30th, 2021.
  • Consideration: Maintaining the tension between “new blood” and continuity of leadership.
  • As we take this to the community, we need to be abundantly clear *what* we are asking of them, but early transparent discussion is preferred where possible.
  • Action: Discussion of how we address it if/when someone steps down. Interim board members to maintain above the minimum number of seats? Rich to write up proposals for solutions, to present to the board.
  • Board sentiment is not in favor of an “interim” member class, further differentiating between different directors.
  • Action: Proposal for “emergency election” for replacing a board member who steps down out of cadence. (Rich to add to above proposals.)

Discussion of development packages not provided in CentOS Stream: Red Hat is keenly aware of the desire to make buildroot packages available in the CentOS Stream project. Progress has been made on plans to enable this in some manner in CentOS Stream without requiring changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The team is currently working to resolve some technical issues.

Discussion of CentOS Stream SIG proposal. https://git.centos.org/centos/board/issue/33 and https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/StreamFeatureRequest General support, but will take this to the mailing list and commit to timely response to this request.

Adjournment at :00

Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors for 2021-03-10

Thursday , 29, April 2021 Thomas Oulevey Board minutes Leave a comment

On 2021-03-10 the CentOS Board of Directors met to discuss ongoing business.

A  proposal to discuss the re-appointment of Directors has been presented by Karsten Wade. The document will be reviewed and it will be then proposed for approval during the next meeting. (More info on the governance updates in issues #22 and #24).

Rich Bowen, annouced that a new online Dojo is planned on May 13th and 14th 2021. All the details can be found at :

https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/May2021

No other issue has been discussed this month, and updates will be amended to tickets if necessary.

Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors for 2021-02-10

Tuesday , 27, April 2021 Thomas Oulevey Board minutes Leave a comment

On 2021-02-10 the CentOS Board of Directors met to discuss ongoing business.

The board welcomed the Hyper Scale SIG Chair (Davide Cavalca) and new Cloud Interim SIG Chair (Amy Marrich).

A proposal to give to all SIG members a @centoproject.org email address has been approved. The new email aliases will be enabled when the new authentication system is deployed in April.

A discussion about the need for a CentOS Stream Kernel SIG around common community interests took place. Some challenges are still being discussed (secure boot, signing, kmods distribution, inter-SIG collaboration, integration of existing external projects). A communication will be sent to the centos-devel mailing list when all requirements are analysed and common ground identified.

Rich Bowen mentioned that additional Dojos will be organised during the year as it is a great way to get community feedback and improve involvement of new contributors.

The code of conduct work is on-going and the board would like to make that process completely transparent, and get help from the community when the initial draft is available. 

To conclude, as mentioned last month,  the SIG status review has been finalized and updates/recommendations sent to all active SIG.

Minutes for CentOS Board of Directors for 2021-01-13

Tuesday , 27, April 2021 Thomas Oulevey Board minutes Leave a comment

On 2021-01-13 the CentOS Board of Directors met to discuss ongoing business.

To improve transparency, the Board welcomed all Special Interest Groups' Chair, and extended the invitation to all future Board of Directors meeting.

A proposal to create a new SIG was reviewed and approved. The board welcomes the Hyperscale SIG to the family and encourages interested parties to contribute.
The common goal is to enable CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures. The SIG chair is Davide Cavalca.

A recap on all SIG status will be carried on in the next week by Rich Bowen.

Brian Exelbierd explain that Red Hat Developer program will be published as soon as they are ready. A first wave will be released during January.
Red Hat continues to analyse feedback received from all communication channels.

The board agreed to draft and enforce a Code of Conduct, based on the recent work conducted by the Fedora Project.

Code of Conduct

Monday , 19, April 2021 Rich Bowen Community Leave a comment

You may have seen, a few days ago, that the Fedora project announced a new Code of Conduct for their community.

In my role as CentOS community manager, I've also been involved in the crafting of that Code, so that we could also use it here in the CentOS project.

Yeah, I know, this is something we should have done a long time ago. But, you know what they say about the best time to plant a tree. (The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.)

As we continue to work to make all aspects of the CentOS Project more open and transparent, it is important that we create an open, welcoming community where all people, from all backgrounds, feel safe in their participation. This allows for a broader contributor pool, with more ideas and more community ownership of the resulting outcomes.

And it's just the right thing to do.

It is our intent to take the text of the Fedora CoC, and replace 'Fedora' with 'CentOS' everywhere, and propose it here. There will, of course, be other small changes to the text (Board vs Council, and so on) but not to the details of the Code itself, and how we intend to address reports. We're holding off on those edits so that our version doesn't drift from theirs, during their 2 week comment period. (Ends April 26th.)

The document is derived from the Contributor Covenant, along with work that has been ongoing in the Fedora project for some time. Note also that the Contributor Covenant is also the source material for the CoC used by the Linux kernel project.

To that end, we encourage you to engage in the discussion around the Fedora CoC, because any changes made there will influence what we end up with here. And we also encourage discussion on centos-devel, for anything that you feel is specific to our community.

CentOS Community Newsletter, April 2021 (#2104)

Tuesday , 6, April 2021 Rich Bowen Newsletter Leave a comment

Dear CentOS Community,

Thanks for joining us for another edition of our monthly newsletter. Here's what's happening in the CentOS community.

Upcoming CentOS Dojo

Yesterday we closed the Call For Presentations (CFP) for the upcoming CentOS Dojo in May, and we hope to publish the schedule of selected presentations this week. Meanwhile, you can register today for the event. Registration is free, but you will need to register to attend. The event will be online, and feature presentations about many aspects of the CentOS project, including several presentations about CentOS Stream. We look forward to seeing you there.

New AAA Infra

As you are hopefully already aware, we are in the midst of rolling out a new AAA (authentication) infrastructure, which we will share with Fedora. If you have an account on either the CentOS or Fedora account system, you should read Fabian's email (and the responses to it) on the centos-devel mailing list for details of what you need to do.

You will be hearing more about this changeover in the coming days, particularly if you are one of the people who has accounts on both projects with conflicting details (ie, same email address but different usernames, or vice versa).

CPE Update

The most recent CPE Update, which you may have seen on the centos-devel mailing list, covers most of the month of March, and contains a lot of exciting new developments, including the new AAA infrastructure (see above) and the list of priorities for the next quarter. Read the whole thing on the blog.

SIG Reports

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are communities who are building something on top of CentOS. SIGs are expected to report quarterly on their progress, health, and opportunities for community participation.

This month we have a report from the Hyperscale SIG.

Meanwhile, the Software Collections SIG, scheduled to report this month, appears to be having a rather slow quarter.

If you're interested in running a SIG around your particular area of interest or expertise, we'd love to hear from you. Bring your proposal to the centos-devel mailing list

Updates/Releases

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during March:

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during March:

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during March:

Other releases

The following releases also happened during March:

Get Involved

There's a number of places where you can get involved in the CentOS Community. These are documented on the "Contribute" page in the wiki.

Ongoing efforts include the wiki itself, which has accumulated a lot of content over the past decade, much of which could stand to be freshened. If you're interested in assisting with the wiki refresh project, the best place to volunteer is on the centos-docs mailing list. The process for proposing changes to the wiki is covered in part 4 of the above-mentioned document.

This newsletter is another place where we always need help - finding stories, writing the content, translating into non-English languages, and working with community members to provide blog posts, technical howtos, or other content for publication to the blog. Please join us on the centos-promo mailing list to step up to do some of that work.

And the every-day work of answering user questions on the centos@centos.org mailing list, the forums, or IRC (#centos on Freenode) is open to anybody with knowledge, patience, and time. Just drop in and introduce yourself.

Get Gear

If you want to proclaim your love for the CentOS Project, we have two main options for obtaining CentOS Gear. Head over to the Red Hat Cool Stuff Store for CentOS shirts and hats. And HelloTux has CentOS tshirts, polo shirts, and sweatshirts!

CentOS Hyperscale SIG Quarterly Report for 2021Q1

Monday , 5, April 2021 Davide Cavalca SIG Leave a comment

This report covers work that happened between January 13th and April 2nd 2021.

Purpose

The Hyperscale SIG focuses on enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling.

Membership update

The SIG was established in January with six founding members (Davide Cavalca, Filipe Brandenburger, Matthew Almond, Justin Vreeland,Thomas Mackey, David Johansen). Since then, four more members have joined (Igor Raits, Neal Gompa, Anita Zhang, Michel Salim).

We welcome anybody that’s interested and willing to do work within the scope of the SIG to join and contribute. See the membership section on the wiki for the current members list and how to join.

Releases and Packages

The SIG releases packages in a main repository. Sources for these packages are maintained in c8s-sig-hyperscale branches in dist-git (example).

Packages released in main are designed to be drop-in replacements for the corresponding packages on a stock CentOS Stream 8 system. This repository can be enabled by installing the centos-release-hyperscale package.

systemd

We ship a backport of systemd 247 based on the Fedora packaging. This includes a variety of bug fixes in existing features such as timers and cgroups, as well as new properties that take advantage of the latest kernel features. You can also look forward to new knobs in the various tools and daemons to make debugging and configuration easier.

By default, this backport will boot the system using the unified cgroup hierarchy (i.e. cgroup2), in line with systemd upstream policy. This can be changed with the appropriate kernel cmdline knobs.

This systemd backport also includes a SELinux overlay module, which allows running systemd 247 on a system in enforcing mode. Nonetheless, the SELinux integration has only seen limited testing and should be considered experimental at this point.

Grep

We ship a backport of Grep 3.6 based on the Fedora packaging. Compared to the stock 3.1 version shipped with the distribution, it includes major performance improvements and several bugfixes.

iptables

The iptables package on CentOS Stream 8 ships with only the nftables backend enabled. As part of the work to enable the legacy backend as well, we have packaged legacy-enabled versions of arptables and ebtables.

MTR

We ship a backport of MTR 0.94 based on the Fedora packaging. This includes several bug fixes, notably improving reliability when running in TCP mode.

dwarves

We ship a backport of dwarves 1.20 based on the Fedora packaging. This includes several improvements to the pahole tool, notably including much better BTF support.

Meson

We ship the latest version (0.55.3 ⇒ 0.57.1) of meson and the latest version (1.8.2 ⇒ 1.10.2) of ninja-build based on the Fedora packaging. This includes many different bug fixes and improvements. We will keep updating them as new versions will get released.

Health and Activity

The SIG was approved by the CentOS board on January 13. So far we’ve been able to maintain a healthy development pace, and hope to continue doing so in the future.

Meetings

The SIG holds regular bi-weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 16:00 UTC. Meetings are logged and the minutes for past meetings are available.

The SIG also uses the #centos-hyperscale IRC channel for ad-hoc communication and work coordination, and the centos-devel mailing list for async discussions and announcements.

Conference talks

The SIG was first introduced at CentOS Dojo, FOSDEM, 2021 (recording). SIG activities were also covered as part of DevConf.cz 2021 (recording) and FOSDEM 2021 (recording).

Future SIG-related talks are planned for CentOS Dojo, May 2021 and for LISA21.

Planned work

The SIG tracks pending work as issues on our Pagure repository. Notable projects currently in flight include:

  • Setting up the experimental repository and publishing a Copy-on-Write enabled build of the packaging stack and optional support for Btrfs-based atomic updates using Micro DNF
  • Shipping up-to-date versions of libvirt backported from Fedora
  • Completing the work to publish an iptables with the legacy backend enabled
  • Engaging with the Cloud SIG to build a set of Cloud images with the Hyperscale repo and packages already baked in

Issues for the Board

We have no issues to bring to the board’s attention at this time.

CPE Weekly: 2021-03-31

Thursday , 1, April 2021 Aoife Moloney Infra Leave a comment

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the two week gap since my last report, we had a busy time in
the CPE team with the new fedora accounts deployment, our quarterly
planning cycle started for Q2 and Ireland had a bank holiday mid week
which *seemed* like a great idea at the time. Until no-one knew what
day it was for about a week!

So here I am, right at the end of Q1 with the CPE teams final weekly
report for January, February and March... two days early

If you would like to see this report and toggle to the section you are
most interested in, I would suggest visiting this link
https://hackmd.io/8iV7PilARSG68Tqv8CzKOQ?view and use the header bar
on your left to skip to where you want to go!

Initiative FYI Links

CPE had our quarterly planning call last Thursday 26th March to
prioritize our project work going into Q2 (quarter 2, which is April,
May & June).
Our initiative repo quarterly boards have been updated
https://pagure.io/cpe/initiatives-proposal/boards/2021Q2
and our repo can be accessed here: https://pagure.io/cpe/initiatives-proposal
Our 2021 Quarterly Planning timetable can also be viewed here if you
are curious on when our next quarterly planning session is:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/cpe/time_tables/
And finally, details on initiative requesting/how to work with us on
new projects here:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/cpe/initiatives/

Going into Q2, the CPE team will work on rpmautospec
https://pagure.io/cpe/initiatives-proposal/issue/11 and aim to deliver
this project within the months of April, May & June. We are starting
this project on Monday 12th April and will keep you posted on where
the team will track work and what IRC channel they will use for comms.

You can also expect a Q1 blog post from us in the next week or two
highlighting the work that the team delivered over the last quarter
too.

Misc

* CentOS Dojo for May 13th & 14th CFP closes on Monday 5th April so
please submit your talks asap!
https://wiki.centos.org/Events/Dojo/May2021

Project Updates

*The below updates are pulled directly from our CPE team call we have
every week.*

CentOS Updates

CentOS

* Account Migration is scheduled for next Tuesday 6th April
* Please read this important email from Fabian Arrotin on
verifying/updating your CentOS and Fedora email address
https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2021-March/076690.html
* CentOS CI is also updating ocp.stg to 4.7.3 & will roll out to
production by the end of the week if all goes well

CentOS Stream

* Centpkg is build and available in Fedora and EPEL!
* MBS is being deployed
* ODCS is deployed
* Scripts for mass rebuild are ready
* CVE Dashboard for CentOS 8 Stream is up
* In short, lots of good things coming!

Fedora

* F34 beta is out!

* Mass reboot is scheduled for tomorrow, April 1st so please expect
some issues due to this required outage
* Final Freeze is due to start on Tuesday April 6th @ 1400 UTC - F34
schedule can be viewed here
https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-34/f-34-key-tasks.html

Noggin/AAA

* Fedora Accounts is out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* There are still some corner case issues being worked through but
users should be able to access fedora services as normal. **NOTE** you
will need to reset your password if you have not already done so if
you receive an Unable to call ID or some note like that. Please
request a password reset and wait for the mail to land. Then follow
the link and reset your password.
* For any issues, please open a ticket on
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issues
* The team can be found on #fedora-aaa for discussions on IRC
* And please report any issues you find relating to the Noggin
application in the repo https://github.com/fedora-infra/noggin
**ANOTHER NOTE** Thank you so so so much to all of the members of the
fedora community and wider open source communities who assisted our
team last week when we were deploying the new system. Your help did
not go unnoticed and unappreciated and we could not have done this
work without any of you. You know who you are, and you have my and the
wider teams sincerest thanks and gratitude

Team Info

Background:

The Community Platform Engineering group, or CPE for short, is the Red
Hat team combining IT and release engineering from Fedora and CentOS.
Our goal is to keep core servers and services running and maintained,
build releases, and other strategic tasks that need more dedicated
time than volunteers can give.

See our wiki page here for more
information: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/cpe/

As always, feedback is welcome, and we will continue to look at ways
to improve the delivery and readability of this weekly report.

Have a great weekend!

Aoife

Source: https://hackmd.io/8iV7PilARSG68Tqv8CzKOQ?view