Colin Charles Agenda

We had our second Red Hat/Fedora Meetup, here in Melbourne. This time it was spiced up by the fact that Richard Keech, the CTA at Red Hat, talked about the Red Hat Network Satellite, afterwhich we all went for some dinner at an expensive restaurant! Some interesting facts (no slides, so just read my notes):

• The largest amount of hosts for the RHN Satellite network would be around 10,000 hosts – a reference points to AOL, among others.
• The Red Hat Network itself has over a million hosts.
• The provisioning feature allows kickstart styled installs – this means that details can be kept on the satellite server. You’re also allowed to compare systems – say between the reference system and many unknown systems (aside: we’ve done this manually with SystemImager, for a golden child, and about 20 clients before). There is support for revision control too, so rolling back an entire system to a totally different state is allowed.
• It allows you to have your own rolled RPMs too, so you don’t only have to pull from RH. Oracle is embedded with this, in one 230MB RPM – yes, you need the database to work with the Satellite network.
• It only runs on RH AS 2.1, and not the newer releases. The product being: “RHN Management Satellite (3.2) for AS 2.1”.

Then there was a bit about the RH Desktop (RHD) solution. The fact that there’s licensed Agfa fonts, with one nearly equivalent to the MS font Arial, providing easy migration. Citrix client, Acrobat Reader, Flash, Real Media, IBM Java2/SDK as well. RHD is basically RHEL3 version 2.

All this got me thinking however. Since the API’s for this are published (mostly?), and it does make use of XMLRPC, and the system is defintely a nice looking one, why haven’t the bored folk out there looking for a project, write another RHN?

Update: There’s NRH-up2date which seems to already do basically this…

You’re not hearing from anyone, because its bugzilla crunch time to make sure things are okay for FC2 (read: no blocker bugs). Some haven’t slept in a day, others are trawling bugzilla. I’m onto my fourth sixth installation today, to look at interesting bugs. One advantage is definitely that SELinux bugs aren’t a blocker any longer.

Go test kernel .353, and SCSI cd-writing. Watch fedora-test-list as more unravels itself.

It’s out, FNU #11. I think this is a must read for most, since it contains special features: Cristian Gafton, the Fedora Project fearless leader talks about his tasks ahead, and Jesse Keating, the Fedora Legacy Project lead talks about how the project is evolving. There’s the usual other stuff, like some FC2test3 notes, some new documentation, useful scripts, and software.

Seth, dude, you rock. You’re my hero for the week.

(and with everyone getting some line from Page 23 out of a book, maybe we should try hero’s for the week next :P)

It’s just got growing pains.

It’s not that the aims are to create another Debian, or even that its to have the size and scope of it (i.e. Fedora doesn’t aim to run on as many architectures as Debian does, not in this early stage at least, till the volunteer base builds up).

A good summary of the issues are even now on LWN, but icon really did portray whats going on. We (the OSS community) know there’s a lack of communication – this can be fixed. We know Red Hat is interested in fixing the Fedora Project – they talked about it at their world wide conference.

Think about it, companies just don’t just open source their babies overnight. It takes time. Patience is a virtue, but normally, patience comes when good communication exists, so we’re back again to lacking communication with the outside world (i.e. those not @redhat.com). The recent outbreak at fedora-devel-list exists because of lack of communication – read soon & eventually from the participate page, as thats an attempt at some communication.

So, stop and think for a moment. You want CVS access? Surely RH can’t give you access to the build system (lest you screw up RHEL, their new RH Desktop, etc…). We want rh_sales to stop bagging Fedora – we need our own “sales team”, and definitely we need to make sure that whatever brainwashing rh_sales goes thru removes such thoughts. And yes, we’re always going to have to deal with rh_legal, because this is a project “sponsored by RH” – maybe a public forum for some of the legal blokes to hang out at (fedora-legal mailing list?).

Things are slow, but patience always means good things happen eventually. Wait for the next Fedora News Updates, there’ll be some interesting scoop there :)

The Linux in Education push is going strong – here in Victoria, Novell wants to rule them all. (Red Hat sleeping on the job, again?) Linux is, after all new life for them.

Chris Pratley has an interesting weblog, where he seems to think that OSS software lacks creativity and has the main aim in cloning equivalent products from Microsoft. That aside, the comments are most interesting (and he agrees that the OOo team isn’t just cloning Office ’97).

Otherwise, while a little dated, Kurt Seifried writes Notes from a Red Hat User/Admin, which does prove to be an interesting read/comparison