News from admins

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Anne Nicolas
On behalf of the Mageia system administration team (aka sysadm team), I am happy to announce that we finally managed to rack our first servers in Marseille on Friday, despite the gas-oil shortage, the strikes, and the various issues we had!


Server

Svn server being installed

All of this would not have been possible without the generous offer of Ielo.net and Lost Oasis, who offered to host our servers in their data-center in Marseille. They have been already hosting zarb.org, TuxFamily and LeaLinux since several years, and provided a lot of support to free software in France.


Also this would not not have been possible without the help of the several donors who helped us with hardware and money to buy disks and to travel to the south of the country. Again, many thanks to all of you.


And finally, this would not have been possible without the hard work of my team mates, Damien and Nicolas who drove from Paris to Marseille, fetched the pieces and assembled the servers, and without the help of Pascal who lent us a hand when setting everything up, and who volunteered to drive to the server room and  push the button in case of problems. We hope we will not ask him to do it too many times, and we would love to have remote administration, but this was not a option given the fact that only one server had one RAC.


So let’s welcome Alamut, Ecosse, Jonund, Valstar and soon Fiona. For those that wonder where does the names come from, we have played a simple game on the sysadm list (which is badly configured at the moment I am writing this but it is a public mailing list by design, this will be fixed later).
For the techno addicts that would like to see the hardware specs, we will document them on the wiki later, once we have set up the permanent wiki.


So the next steps of infrastructure deployment, after some deserved rest (in what’s left of the weekend), will be to set up the basic infrastructure for administration (ie puppet, svn, accounts, etc).
Then we will proceed into migrating the DNS from zarb.org to our servers, and set up a first LDAP directory to hold accounts, as this is a central component in our planned infrastructure. After that we will have to setup SQL servers, apache, and some web applications like Epoll, to start working on team creation. Stay tuned for news and pictures on the blog, (and thanks for reading until the end 🙂 ).
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One month later: Mageia’s home is almost habitable!

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Anne Nicolas
Work is going on in quite a good way? yep, here is the latest news from the front!

  • Mageia hosting: as announced in the previous post, we have now a full hosting solution for the Mageia project. Servers are now in Marseille, in ielo.net datacenter. All is now ready to be configured by Saturday for the Mageia build system. We bought some hardware (hard disks, 1 backup server, power switch) in order to make it easier to manage the Mageia servers. Build system team will work in coming week on setting it up and let you guys start at last doing some real work :).
  • Central authentication: Along with setting up the build system, the team is working on an LDAP centralized solution to manage all authenticated services (Bugzilla, build system, svn, blog, forums…). It will come with a web interface to be as easy as a click for all users. Buchan has already committed a first version, you can have a look at the source code here: svn://svn.mageia.org/soft/identity (anonymous). Code is being reviewed before we use it in production.
  • The Mageia roadmap and policies: a first official statement will be proposed by the end of this month: a roadmap for the coming 6 months, a layout for Mageia repositories, a statement about various license issues and drafts to discuss for various project policies.
  • Association: Mageia.Org creation is on the way in the French administration. We should have it officially created within 4 weeks. For now we have a receipt that allows us to open a bank account, which we will do in the coming days. It will be usable as soon as Mageia.Org creation is official. So for now we keep using the help of AUFML for accepting donations (thanks to the AUFML guys again for helping us with this!).
  • Code of Conduct: in order to help daily work, a code of conduct is now available. The Mageia team decided to not reinvent the wheel and worked from Mandriva Linux community Code of Conduct. It has been a bit adapted to the Mageia community’s needs and is available for translation.

Freely

Mageia team

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Home, Sweet Home!

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

We have some very good news today that we’d like to share with you: Mageia is no longer homeless :). We have now a full hosting solution thanks to ielo.net , a French host and provider in the south of France. We would like to thank Julien and Bertrand for their kindness as they will sponsor the Mageia project for hosting and bandwidth.

The Mageia team is now working to prepare all the servers, buy new hard disks and some required hardware (details of expenses will be published of course). We should be able to install them in the datacenter by the end of next week. Then the hard work can start at last! 🙂

Freely

Mageia team

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Mageia news: another busy week!

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

It’s been another very busy week for Mageia! Here is the latest news regarding our progress and the goals for the coming days.

  • Mageia Values: here they are! Thanks to the Mageia marketing team, after discussions, we present the Mageia values page. Please have a look. It will let you appreciate and understand how we see the Mageia project and its values.
  • Mageia.org association: as explained in the previous post, Mageia.org will manage the Mageia project (resources, legal aspects, …). The association has been registered on the 7th of October and should be validated within one month. Long life to Mageia.org!
  • Teams organisation: at the beginning of this week we will propose a process and some advice to start various teams’ work. One of the first tasks will be to elect one representative for the Mageia council and also choose a leader and a co-leader. In order to organise these elections, Olivier Thauvin has finalized the version 2.0 of Epoll, thanks to the help of the Mageia community for debugging and translation. You can test it right now, Epoll will be installed and configured for Mageia.
  • Mageia forums: Maat and Ashledombos have set up phpBB 3 on a temporary dedicated server. It’s now fully working and configured for Mageia needs. We still need to plug it to the LDAP directory for authentication. This will bring centralized authentication and avoid to have several login/password for all Mageia environment. MLO team will kindly host the Mageia forums as they proposed it to help Mageia. As a reminder, this forum will be like a portal for Mageia users. It will also provide links on all local Mageia forums. If you wish to be part of this list, just answer to this post, and you will be contacted. As asked on the mageia-discuss mailing-list, mail gateway on forums will be studied to check if it is technically (and practically) possible and how it can be best organised.
  • Build system and Mageia environment hosting: we are waiting for an answer to get the Mageia build system hosted in some good conditions for the project. As soon as we have a definitive answer, we will rack the servers and start setting up the build system. Also big thanks to gandi for providing us with two virtual machines. It’s used for now to host the LDAP directory. Stay tuned!
  • Centralized authentication: as explained above, the team is working on a centralised authentication using an LDAP directory. Together with an easy web interface, you will be able to register through your account to any Mageia service: Bugzilla, forums, mailing-lists, svn, … It should be as easy as a click. Buchan Milne is our expert on that task :).
  • Mirrors management: Olivier Thauvin has started to work on a web application for mirrors management. It will help to register and maintain mirrors list.
  • PandaBoard: Mageia has applied to the PandaBoard project. The Pandaboard is an ARM board using the TI OMAP4 processor, the project offers some for development. It should be included in the ARM port for Mageia.

As a note, all founders’ meetings are now public. You can see details on wiki.

As usual, you can use mailing-lists, this blog and mageia-contact to comment or ask any questions. Thanks for your patience and see you soon for more news!

Mageia team

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