Weekly roundup 2017 – week 14

Posted on April 7, 2017 by Donald Stewart

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servers which had to be taken down were the most exposed as they hosted most web-facing services (and since they ran outdated software, also the most vulnerable).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 0.21.7 
  • 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 🙂

Posted in Atelier, community, packager, QA, release, security, sysadmin, Weekly roundup | 8 Comments

Web services shut down preventively

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Rémi Verschelde

Our sysadmins decided to preventively shut down most of our web services which were still running on end-of-life Mageia versions, as their potential vulnerability to remote attacks was publicised in third party communities.

The migration of those services to Mageia 5 servers was planned but delayed due to a lack of sysadmin time to work on it. The unexpected publicity that it received obviously made this topic a high priority one, our infrastructure being exposed as an easy target. The sysadmins therefore decided to shut down the services to be able to work on the migration without further risks.

Please note that our buildsystems for packages and ISO images are running the latest stable release, and therefore Mageia users need (as far as we know at this stage) not be concerned. The potential risks should be confined to web services of the mageia.org domain – we are nevertheless auditing all servers for traces of intrusion which could have been facilitated by the outdated infrastructure.

We are sorry for the disagreement and this security negligence, and will keep you posted with our progress on this issue and the verification of the services.

Current status:

  • Homepage (www): online
  • Blog: online
  • Identity: online
  • Bugzilla (bugs): online
  • Mailing list (ml): online
  • Wiki: online
  • Forums: online
  • Mirrors index and MIRRORLIST (mirrors): online
  • Git / Svn: online
  • Gitweb / Svnweb: online
  • Buildsystem (pkgsubmit): online
  • Mageia App DB (madb): online

Edit Apr 5, 2017 @ 17:45: Added more details about services being down and the security risks.

Edit Apr 5, 2017 @ 20:45: Instructions to add a specific mirror manually for MIRRORLIST users.

Edit Apr 6, 2017 @ 8:00: Web services had been mistakenly put back online automatically during the night, they are now back offline as necessary.

Edit Apr 8, 2017 @ 1:00: Bugzilla and MIRRORLIST are functional again. Bugzilla was also updated to the latest 5.0.3+ upstream version.

Edit Apr 9, 2017 @ 0:15: Identity is back online.

Edit Apr 20, 2017 @ 15:00: Wiki is back online. Gitweb and Svnweb were also restored in the past week, and the mailing list software will be back soon.

Edit May 26, 2017 @ 21:00: As of now all services are back online! Thanks to our sysadmins for their precious time! 🙂

Posted in Mageia, security, sysadmin | 35 Comments

Weekly roundup 2017 – week 13

Posted on March 31, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Cauldron

The big Cauldron news is that ISO testing for Mageia 6 RC is well under way, new images were generated that will hopefully fix the EFI implementation and some grub config issues. Gnome 3.24 will be available on the upcoming ISOs as pre-testing has not shown any issues. We’re also hoping to have most blocker bugs fixed before the RC release, the list is getting nice and short, so hopefully that won‘t take long. If you want to get involved with pre-release ISO testing, the QA team always has room for more hardware and hands.

Big updates include:

  • libbluray 1.0.0 – there might be some broken deps with this while the needed packages are rebuilt
  • kernel 4.9.19
  • webkit2 2.16.0
  • firefox 52.0.2
  • urpmi 8.106-2 – this increases the transaction size from 8 to 50, it will help with upgrades from Mageia 5 to 6
  • chrome-gnome-shell – this should add some nice functionality to Gnome

The other big talking point aside from the RC release in the Council Meeting was the inclusion of the new Manatools for system configuration on the ISOs. The ncurses versions will be added, along with dnfdragora, but the integration of the graphical front ends was pushed until after Mageia 6 to give proper testing time.

Mageia 5

R-base was patched against CVE 2016-8714, the other big update is to the kernel, 4.4.59 which will fix a vulnerability found in the pwn2own contest.

Community

We will be at the Libre Software Days in Lyon this weekend, so if you are in the area drop by and meet some of our contributors or catch up on the other projects on show.

We have been using Mypads from Framasoft a lot for blog posts and announcements, this is being written on one in fact. To that end, we have made a ‎€250 donation, full blog about how we use Mypads and Framasoft can be read here.

Posted in bugsquad, community, Mageia, QA, release, users, Weekly roundup | 5 Comments

Donation to Framasoft

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Donald Stewart

When we at Mageia write blog posts and other announcements, we use a collaborative editing tool called Etherpad to draft the text.  In the past, the links to these draft documents were accessible from our mailing list archives and wide open for anyone to access.  Fortunately, we found a better way to do this thanks to Framasoft. Framasoft provides the excellent MyPads platform, which provides a folder to store multiple Etherpads with access control, title editing, and sorting by date and name. Having a single point of access for our draft documents has been a huge help to getting blog posts written and proofread, and has provided a way to keep track of what we have coming. In addition to this excellent service, Framasoft provides other services such as spreadsheets, mind–mapping, drawing, and undoubtedly some other tools that we will find useful in the future. A full list can be seen here. While Framasoft does host and offers free usage of these services, it should be noted that their main aim is to develop this platform for self-hosting, not to offer a hosted service.

It is to this end that we would like to announce a donation of €250 to Framasoft. It has always been one of the goals of Mageia to not only develop an excellent high-quality operating system and community surrounding the project, but also to help with the general development and support of Free and Open Source software in the wider community. It is excellent to be able to use and support an association like Framasoft. They offer fantastic services, and supporting them fits with the goals that Mageia has laid out since the beginning. You can read more about the Framasoft association here.

As a further note to this, we would like to look into hosting the Framasoft software on our own infrastructure in the future. Unfortunately, with the infrastructure administration resources we currently have available, our current priorities are the release of Mageia 6 and general upkeep. Further development of our infrastructure will have to take place in the future as time and resources allow. So, in the meantime, we hope that this donation will help to cover our usage of Framasoft’s services.

Posted in Collaboration, community, Mageia, treasurer | 5 Comments

Mageia at JDLL 2017 in Lyon on the 1st and 2nd of April

Posted on March 28, 2017 by Samuel Verschelde

JDLL banner

A quick late notice that a few contributors will have a stand at the yearly Libre Software Days in Lyon (“Journées du Logiciel Libre”, in French), as they do every year, next weekend (1st and 2nd of April).

As always, it’s a nice occasion to discuss and get to know others in the Mageia community (which includes every user, of course) as well as see what other communities are working on, so if you happen to be able to come, you are welcome!

The event’s program (in french) : http://www.jdll.org/programme/

Posted in community, events, Mageia, users | 5 Comments