Weekly roundup 2017 – week 14

Infrastructure

So sadly the big news this week is the outage of two of our servers for needed upgrades. The status of the services that are down can be read here. Our sysadmins have been hard at work, already pushing 30 patches to our infrastructure and working on porting the PostgreSQL database used by most services to a new server.

The first priority is to get the mirrorlist service running again quickly as it has the largest impact on users. Our Bugzilla, which will not only be moved to a machine running Mageia 5 but will also be upgraded to Bugzilla 5, will be the next step. The homepage has already been moved to a server that is fully up to date and had no downtime.

Note that the mirrorlist and Bugzilla were restored shortly after publishing, thanks to the sysadmins for finishing the upgrades so quickly.

While the updates on the two servers we preventively took down were severely needed for security reasons, they have been in planning for a significant time, and require non-trivial development work to port scripts, templates and configurations to the updated Mageia 5 ecosystem.

The outage only affected two of our many servers. All of our other servers, including the build nodes, for i586, x86_64 and arm, which I struggled to count from memory, 6 arm and 3 x86 at last count – I swear the arm nodes are multiplying, ISO builder and the repository server have remained active and fully up to date on Mageia 5, busily building for Cauldron and Mageia 5, you can see the queue here. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the two servers which had to be taken down were the most exposed as they hosted most web-facing services (and since they ran outdated software, also the most vulnerable).

We can only apologise that these upgrades have not happened sooner, even if the impact on the development has been minimal, we will have to continue to make changes in our sysadmin procedures to ensure that upgrades are simpler and timelier in the future.

Once the services migration is complete, we will publish a blog post to give a better overview of what the components of our infrastructure are, what software they run, how the sysadmin team maintains it and the evolution in our sysadmin team that has been happening to for some time now.

Cauldron

ISO building and testing for Mageia 6 RC has been making good progress. The release blockers are being fixed nicely, a new drakxtools included on the latest ISOs fixed a number of partitioning bugs so the ISOs are starting to become satisfactory. The Live ISOs are now ready for wider QA testing, and an EFI issue that was holding up the 64-bit Classical ISOs has hopefully been fixed. 

There were updates to many packages, the highlights of which were:

  • drakconf 13.15 aka Mageia Control Center – fixes 3 bugs, improved message for missing packages (mga#20614), dropped legacy loaders (mga#18572) and improved Gtk+ animations (mga#19827)
  • webkit2 2.16.1 fixes several crashes and rendering issue, numerous CVEs
  • darktable 2.2.4 adds a few new features, more supported cameras and lots of bugfixes
  • mate 1.18.1 fixes multiple memory leaks as well as improving support for status-notifier
  • dnf 2.2.0 
  • enlightenment 0.21.
  • kernel 4.9.20 added firmware for Intel 6030 wifi cards and added more Polaris 12 PCI IDs.

Mageia 5

There were updates to a number of packages for Mageia 5 this week, including:

  • webkit 2 2.16.1 fixes several crashes and rendering issue, numerous CVEs
  • python-django 1.18.16 with numerous CVE fixes
  • nvidia-current 375.39 with CVE fixes and new GPU support
  • phpmyadmin 4.4.15.10 with numerous CVE fixes
  • wget 1.15 fixes various CVEs

These updates are going through validation, so will be pushed to a mirror once that process is completed. The Bugzilla downtime makes the QA team’s work slightly harder, but they are keeping testing via their mailing list, so updates should keep coming as usual 🙂

This entry was posted in Atelier, community, packager, QA, release, security, sysadmin, Weekly roundup. Bookmark the permalink.

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8 Responses to Weekly roundup 2017 – week 14

  1. ankifFranck says:

    Thanks for these regular updates on the release process. Really enlightening.

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  3. Donald Stewart says:

    Mirrorlist is back up now, will become fully available in a few hours after DNS propagation.

    A massive thanks to the sysadmins for their work on this.

  4. aguador says:

    Very nice summary. How can users help with the server issues? Is this a matter of being understaffed, money for servers or . . . ?

    It is also nice to see mention of Enlightenment, a DE that felt abandoned in Mga5. It is now up-to-date and, with luck, will have an ample selection of workable themes packaged by the time Mga6 is released.

    I know that I am biased in part by the advances with E21, but I believe that Mga6 with be the best Mageia ever. Not only will E be up to date, but the new Plasma 5 desktop looks fantastic, and the addition of the nicely configured Live XFCE version gives potential users more reasons than ever to try Mageia and see why so many of us have chosen it. I should also mention the addition of the Vertex GTK themes that provide alternatives to Adwaita and one of the best dark themes created to date.

    • Donald Stewart says:

      The infrastructure maintenance, or rather the sysadmin team is lacking in man power, the issue is that unlike with packaging where there is lots of probation and room for learning, setting an apprentice loose on the servers with root access doesn’t really work. So the mentoring process takes a lot longer than say for packaging. The sysadmins are working on ways to make the access more modular and allow for a faster mentoring process – more on that in the coming blog post about all of these changes.
      Money wise we are well stocked, there are some coming upgrades to the existing servers, if they are not already there, and arm nodes seem to just appear.

      You are right about Mageia 6 looking good though, if you’re really interested in enlightenment, you could always sign up to do some packaging for it, I’m sure that there will be room for some extra hands there.

      • aguador says:

        Actually, I have signed up. The problem is that I have trouble finding the time to learn.

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