Scheduled servers downtime

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Anne Nicolas

We are going to make some upgrades in our data center in Marseille from this Wednesday to Thursday (February 1st and 2nd).

As a consequence, some servers will be offline and the following services will be impacted for that period of time (likely unavailable): LDAP, build system, SVN repositories, Bugzilla (read-only), @mageia.org mail aliases, mailing-lists managed by sympa (@ml.mageia.org), Wiki (read-only), forums (read-only), transifex, epoll, svn, git, youri web interface, maint db.

So, expect not to be able to use our services for those two full days. This blog, the main Web site and other mailing-lists managed by mailman (@mageia.org) will still be available.

In the meantime, in our Marseille data center, 4 of our sysadmin team (dams, boklm, rtp and misc in this case) will do nothing less than:

  • upgrade servers to Mageia 1,
  • replace broken HDD (smart errors on 4 disks) with new brand WD RE4,
  • add 1 SSD in each build node for packaging and add 2 HDD (raid1) for the system,
  • install our ARM build system “homemade”: we will upload pictures of it,
  • install a dedicated server for backups, fiona, with more than 3TB in raid5,
  • install a dedicated server for QA and packagers: dual AMD 6-core, 32GB of RAM, 2x300GB (SAS 15k) in raid0 .

All hardware purchased thanks to what Mageia.Org received from so many donators.
Thank you again!

This is quite a short notice, we apologize for this. Thank you for your comprehension (and please spread the info to your list/team if relevant).

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Protect the Internet, say no to SOPA

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Anne Nicolas

Mageia joins the anti-SOPA online strike this January 18.

What is SOPA? It’s a great legislation to bring if you want governments and corporations to decide what you can or cannot do and say on the Internet: state and corporate censorship. This article on why SOPA and Protect IP are bad ideas has a great summary about this.

Although SOPA and PIPA are US-only bills, they would deeply impact the Internet, worldwide, for individuals and organisations, on many levels. They may badly influence for similar, more local initiatives as well (although some countries did not wait for them, unfortunately).

This is serious. This is about outdated business models and practices that struggle to survive, at all costs for others to pay, instead of embracing change and struggling to reform. It’s the “back to the trees” mindset. It’s the reptilian brain against the neocortex.

We oppose the views behind these bills, we oppose the vision of the Internet and of society these bills come from and want to lead to.

Joining the demonstration is a small, puny, short step. We take this step. With thousands and thousands others.

Note: this strike will impact diversely on our Wiki, our blog and our main web site.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Here comes Mageia 2 Alpha3!

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Anne Nicolas

The third development release, Mageia 2 Alpha3 is now available for tests. This is the last alpha version so we really need your input now.

More information on Alpha3:

Thanks to everyone for their hard work on Alpha 2 development and Alpha 3 first tests.

Note: Due to Dracut migration, live CDs upload will be delayed until end of next week. Work is in progress on draklive to fix this.

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

Happy New Mageia Year!

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Patricia Fraser

Welcome back from the holidays! It seems like we’re all refreshed, we all had a great time and we’re all ready to dive into 2012 and make Mageia even better.

First up on the events calendar is FOSDEM.

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting. It’s a 2-day conference held in Brussels, Belgium, and it’s to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. Held every February for more than 10 years, it’s a major event for the free software enthusiast in Europe. Check out our FOSDEM planning page for 2012 here.

We were there last year for the first time as Mageia. Here’s our report.
This year we’ll be a little bit more visible at FOSDEM, because we’ve grown, so we hope it’s a bit easier to find us:

On the Mageia stand

Like last year, we have been granted a stand in the section dedicated to community projects, alongside other distributions such as Opensuse, Fedora, or projects like GNOME and KDE.

We will be there to answer to questions, present the project, showcase the new alpha 3 ISO, give away Live Mageia 1 CDS and to have a friendly chat with everybody who would like to share with us. Please do come and say hello if you have the occasion, between talks.

If you’re a Mageia person, we’d love to have your help – come and hand out CDs, tell people how you use Mageia, talk to other packagers and developers, or just get a picture taken with your favorite Mageia contributors!

Mageia-related talks

And again, like last year, we’re doing our part with the talks and sessions.

Our contributor Misc (Michael Scherer) will do a talk about the distribution, more precisely about the unified login setup that was set up by sysadmins. He will also participate in a round table about the subject of system administration of Linux distribution projects, to share and discuss ideas.

Several other talks are planned, like a cross distribution talk about local team, and there’s a proposal for a session called “Cross distro problem solving” that we might be part of. We’ll update the FOSDEM page on the wiki as we get more info.

Mageia General Assembly

Each year Mageia must hold a General Assembly, to elect replacement board members, give a financial report and do some other reporting, and to conduct other business as required.

We’ll be announcing the place, day and time of the Assembly once it’s fixed, as well as announcing the final agenda and the process for nominations and voting.

The Saturday Dinner at FOSDEM

We’re starting to put our names down on the list to have dinner on Saturday night. The list is on the wiki page – come join us!

How you can help at FOSDEM

  • Log into the wiki and go to the FOSDEM planning page.
  • Put your name down to help on the stand and contact the stand organiser – details are on the wiki page.

Come and join the fun!

Posted in events, Mageia | 10 Comments

Server outage

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

From sysadmin team

Update 2011/12/29 00:30 UTC: Main server is now back and we have fixed everything.

Update 2011/12/20 15:30 UTC: Mageia website has been migrated to an other server. Mailing lists are still offline. We are still working on it.
—

Last night, around 00:40 CET, the main server of zarb.org, which still hosts some of the mageia services, suffered from serious I/O problems on the boot volume of the raid array. One of the admins decided to reboot it hoping this could solve the problem, but the server was not able to start up and the various remote control systems (serial cable, admin card) are not sufficient to solve this problem. Zarb.org admins have contacted Lost Oasis (who offers hosting to Mageia.Org and Zarb.org) to find a solution. Since the servers are in south of France, few people of the team can access it without a long travel.

We have no ETA to give for now. The known impacted services are:

  • some of the mailing lists (at least mageia-dev, mageia-discuss and some others)
  • the main website (www.mageia.org)
  • the old wiki (new one on wiki.mageia.org is fine).

The build system as well as all other websites are working fine. All data is safe on a backup on another server, but without physical access and spare drives we cannot do much for the server.

Feel free to ask on IRC (#mageia or #mageia-dev on irc.freenode.net) if you have any questions. We will update this post as soon as we have more information.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 11 Comments