We are happy to welcome our new sponsored Fedora Ambassadors in September:

Fedora Ambassador Statistics

Sun Sep 30 10:47:14 2012 | Accounts checked : 606 | Inactive Accounts : 80 | % inactive : 13.20

For those of you keeping score at home

As you may have noticed, Joerg (kital) has retired from performing the FAMA duties, and I have taken over. I would personally like to thank him for his excellent work.

Since I’m now in charged of FAMA, I’m modifying the process to fit my availability. Essentially, this means two things:

1. All ambassador applications will be processed on a weekly basis (this usually means a Sunday morning). If I am going to be unavailable on Sunday, I’ll try to get it done as soon as possible before/after that time.
2. Welcome notices will only go out once a month, in an update email / post. This post is the first of the monthly posts.

If you have any questions, you can email me or find me in #fedora-ambassadors on irc.freenode.net (herlo is my fas and irc nick).

Cheers,

Herlo

When is this happening you ask? Well it’s very simple and very soon, in fact it’s happening July 27-28, 2012. Yes, that’s Tomorrow and Saturday. It’s a bit unexpected for some of you, to be sure, but if you can make it, we’d love to have you for any time possible. If you can’t make it, take some time this next week and work on the GoOSe. The goal is to get the Golden GoOSe 6.0 release out by the end of August, so we really need to start cranking!

What’s left, you ask? Quite a bit actually, but the biggest piece still remaining is our Quality Assurance testing and reporting components. We’re working on them in our qa repository on github, and you can most definitely fork it and get an idea of what we’re doing. We need some serious help with ABI compliance, validation of RPMS and overall validation that all packages have been built.

Wait! There’s more! We also need help with documentation, code and usability testing of the isos. The documentation is all based upon our
‘How to Cook a Goose’ wiki page on github, the skein code needs to be
updated to the new github v3 api and the Isos can be downloaded and
tested.

Some of this is more self-explanatory and some is just plain confusing. This is where we need your help! If you have ever wanted to define how things work, you can jump in now and help us identify things and help us solve problems. That’s the fun part about free and open source software! A good for instance, what is the usability testing requirements for our Isos? Well at the moment, we don’t really have a good handle on this, but you could step in and define some requirements. If you would prefer to help write code, you could clean up things that might look a bit messy. There’s plenty to do!

Please come and help us out this weekend or anytime next week! We’ll be in #gooseproject on irc.freenode.net, or you can work by email, github or ESP. We’re excited to be moving forward and look for your help making the the ‘Quest for the Golden GoOSe’ 6.0 release a reality!

Cheers,

Clint

The Fedora project will be putting on a Beefy Miracle lunch across the street from SELF on Saturday (I think it’s at noon) so come by and get a Beefy Miracle in honor of Fedora 17.

Also, stop by the Fedora booth sometime during the weekend with your canned goods we’ll be collecting this weekend for the Loaves and Fishes food pantry in Charlotte, NC. Their priority list includes canned meats, canned pasta (such as spaghetti’os, ravioli, etc.), cereal, canned fruit, and 100% fruit juice. Nothing in glass, please!

Plus, you’ll get a little surprise in return. I won’t give it away, but as you might have guessed it’s something that is definitely beefy. Hope to see you there!

There are quite a few other goodies on the schedule, so please feel free to peruse. It should be a great weekend!

Cheers,

herlo

I use IRC a LOT. IRC Clients allow users to send what are called “private messages” (or PMs). Today, I sent a private message to my friend Kevin Fenzi. I received the following reply:

‘(Autoreply) Please consider if what you are sending me needs to be in a Private message. See: http://tinyurl.com/64vdbql‘ (sic)

So I clicked…. and what I read pretty much fit my thought process. I think it’s pretty great, so I thought I would share with all of you.

—
There are a few cases where PM’s could possibly be acceptable:

• You have something that NEEDS to be private (account info, phone number, etc). You should ask yourself however if a unencrypted IRC session is the right place to send that info. Perhaps a phone call, a scp to a secure server, or a gpg encrypted email would be better?
• It’s something you need to impart to JUST that one person. A friendly jibe or conversation with someone you know well perhaps, or a quick note from someone that they are running late or are going to do something for you.

That said, there are a number of cases where they are NOT a good idea (especially in support channels):

• The person you are PMing might be busy, so you get no answer, but many others in a common channel may know the answer to your question.
• The person you are PMing might give you a incorrect or incomplete answer, which other people in a common channel could correct or expand on.
• Other people in a common channel cannot learn from your question or any answers you get. Perhaps they too were interested in doing that? Perhaps they have a related question that comes from that one? It’s good for everyone to ask questions in a common channel.
• It doesn’t scale. You can’t always ask a person your questions directly. Sometimes people are on vacation or busy and you will not get answers. If 100 people try and ask one person privately each question most IRC clients would go crazy with tabs and trying to keep track of those separate conversations.
• Some people provide support for things for a living. If you are directly PMing them shouldn’t you pay for private support?
• IRC is somewhat transitory. Unless someone has setup a bouncer (znc, bip, dircproxy) and set it to record private messages, they can easily be lost (just reboot without checking all of them and many clients won’t show them on restart of the app). So, if you PM someone the message may well not get through anyhow.

Finally there are some modes of interest (on freenode at least):

• /umode +R – This will prevent people who are unidentified with freenode services from sending you private messages.
• /umode +g – This will prevent you from receiving private messages from anyone not on a session-defined whitelist. The content of the whitelist can be controlled using the /accept command. When a user not on the whitelist attempts to contact you, you will receive a notice informing you of the fact and you can then use /accept user to speak to them. Users can be removed from the whitelist using /accept -user. Finally, /accept * will print the whitelist.
• Other clients or IRC bouncers may have ways to log/ignore/etc private messages. See your clients docs.

In some channels/areas it’s polite to ask before PMing: ‘Hey, foo, mind if I PM you my phone number?’ or ‘Hey foo, can I PM’.

So, next time you are in a community channel and want to PM someone, do consider the above before doing so, odds are it would be much better to just ask in the main community channel than PM some particular person.
—

Cheers,

herlo

Just released today is the second Release Candidate (Beta-RC2) for GoOSe 6.0 – You can find it here. In addition to the DVD, netinstall and CD installation images, you will now find a Live Desktop ISO.

Please help us by downloading and using the ISO images. File any bugs you find. It’s incredibly easy to become a contributor!! (If you are not a contributor yet, please email bugs to the goose-linux mailing list.)

Cheers,

herlo

Coming up this Saturday at UTOSC 2012, we will be setting up a room dedicated to boardgames. We’ll be LA 122 starting at 10am and going until someone kicks us out of the building. It could be a fairly late night of boardgame fun!!

If you plan on attending any or all of the boardgames session at UTOSC, please bring your boardgames. Mark them in some fashion with your name, and bring them down! We need tons of games as many people will come to play!

Myself, I’ll be bringing at least the following games, possibly more:

• Mag Blast
• Ticket to Ride (USA and Europe)
• Small World
• Killer Bunnies
• Dominion
• Apples to Apples
• Bang!

Bring your games or come and play what is there. Either way it should be a blast!

Cheers,

herlo

The first will be on my latest project, GoOSe Linux – Rebuilding Enterprise Linux the ‘Community’ Way at 11:15am on Thursday, May 3.. If you ever wondered why CentOS took so long to rebuild Enterprise Linux, wondered what other options are out there, or even were just curious how Linux is built, come by and listen. It will be entertaining and enlightening.

The second talk will be Koji – A Reliable, Repeatable Build Environment, 4pm on Thursday, May 3. If you aren’t aware of what Koji does, it builds and manages RPMs. While we use it for the GoOSe project, many folks need a simple and clean way to build packages in a repeatable and reliable way.  Koji can also build LiveCD/LiveDVD images, manages repositories, tags builds and much, much more.

The last presentation I will be giving is ‘The State of Open Source‘, it’s a keynote presentation at 1:30pm on Friday, May 4. Expect this talk to be light and fun! I hope everyone comes out and enjoys this talk as well.

Additionally, it looks like Victor and the gang have created badges for you to put on your blog, Facebook, Google+, etc. so get them out there and come hang out at UTOSC 2012!

Cheers,

herlo

If you attend the event, you will receive two study guides and an ec2 instance for about 24-hours. The idea is that you will spend the day today studying with others to improve your system administration skills. There are no instructors, but I will be there to get the ec2 instances setup and help with any non-study related issues.

If you are interested in the sysadminSG,  come visit us at SCaLE10x today:

Cheers,

Herlo

Now we’re announcing the Sysadmin Study Group will be the Fedora Activity Day at SCaLE 10x!

So Exciting!

Well, it’s been a week since the first run of my ec2 instances for the SysadminSG (or System Administrators Study Group).Things look promising. The folks over in #fedora-cloud and #boxgrinder have been especially helpful! Thanks a ton msavy and gholms and rbergeron too!

The plan here is to grant every user in a room access to an ec2 instance for 24-hours. It may be shorter or longer, depending on a few unknowns at this time. After some additional testing tonight, I think just a bit more work and the workshop will ready. We still need to update the Study Guide to match the RHEL6 RHCSA exam and RHCE exam requirements, so if anyone wants to take that on, just let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.

If you are looking to do some RHCE prep with others, come on down to the Sysadmin SG workshop at either FUDCon Blacksburg or SCaLE 10x! We look forward to seeing you there!

Cheers,

Herlo