Dear CentOS enthusiast,

Here's what's been happening in the past month at CentOS.

Releases and updates

The following releases and updates happened in October. For each update, the given URL provides the upstream notes about the change.

Errata and Enhancements Advisories

We issued the following CEEA (CentOS Errata and Enhancements Advisories) during October:

CEEA-2018:2903 CentOS 6 oracleasm Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023064.html

CEEA-2018:2984 CentOS 7 xorg-x11-server Enhancement - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023071.html

Errata and Security Advisories

We issued the following CESA (CentOS Errata and Security Advisories) during October:

CESA-2018:2881 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023049.html

CESA-2018:2884 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023051.html

CESA-2018:2892 Moderate CentOS 6 glusterfs Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023058.html

CESA-2018:2898 Moderate CentOS 6 nss Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023061.html

CESA-2018:2846 Important CentOS 6 kernel Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023062.html

CESA-2018:2916 Important CentOS 7 spamassassin Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023065.html

CESA-2018:2918 Important CentOS 7 ghostscript Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023066.html

CESA-2018:2921 Important CentOS 7 tomcat Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023067.html

CESA-2018:2943 Critical CentOS 6 java-1.8.0-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023068.html

CESA-2018:2942 Critical CentOS 7 java-1.8.0-openjdk Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023069.html

CESA-2018:3006 Critical CentOS 6 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023070.html

CESA-2018:3005 Critical CentOS 7 firefox Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023072.html

CESA-2018:C001 CentOS 7 xorg-x11-server Security - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023075.html

Errata and Bugfix Advisories

We issued the following CEBA (CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories) during October:

CEBA-2018:2901 CentOS 6 device-mapper-multipath BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023052.html

CEBA-2018:2895 CentOS 6 libcgroup BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023053.html

CEBA-2018:2894 CentOS 6 mailx BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023054.html

CEBA-2018:2897 CentOS 6 zsh BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023055.html

CEBA-2018:2899 CentOS 6 ypserv BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023056.html

CEBA-2018:2896 CentOS 6 nfs-utils BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023057.html

CEBA-2018:2900 CentOS 6 dhcp BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023059.html

CEBA-2018:2893 CentOS 6 gcc-libraries BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023060.html

CEBA-2018:3013 CentOS 6 tzdata BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023073.html

CEBA-2018:3013 CentOS 7 tzdata BugFix - https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2018-October/023074.html

SIG Updates

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - are where people work on the stuff that runs on top of CentOS.

NFV SIG

We have been focused on VPP and pre-requisite packages required to build VPP.

OVS and DPDK are available in Cloud SIG but can also be made available in NFV SIG on request.

Current projects are enabling building of VPP 1810 which requires toolset7 and some additional build dependencies.

Storage SIG

Luminous is the current latest major version of ceph maintained by the SIG

We have very recently promoted in this repo the very first version of ceph-ansible which supports ansible 2.6 (previously it would only work with 2.4 and 2.5)

There isn't and probably there won't be a repo for the mimic version

There will be a repo for the nautilus version instead, which will be the first ceph version supporting centos 8

Get involved with the SIGs!

At the recent SIG gathering at CERN, we discussed at some length how to get more people, and more projects, involved in the SIG process.

A SIG is a place for related projects to gather, to work together to get their products packaged, tested, and distributed in CentOS. For example, the Cloud SIG has representatives from OpenStack and Cloudstack, producing packages of their code.

Unfortunately, many of our SIGs have only one project represented. For example, the Storage SIG is primarily Gluster, while the Virtualization SIG is primarily oVirt. We'd like to expand these to include more projects, both to increase the diversity of project availability on CentOS, and because these projects are often solving similar problems, and can cooperate on them.

Which brings us to you. There are so many ways that you can get involved in the SIG process, no matter what your skills and interests.

Packaging

The primary output of a SIG is a package repository, and so creating those packages tends to be where the main focus of a SIG rests. If you like to create packages, or want to learn how, this is your place to get involved.

Testing

While there's extensive process around automated testing of the packages, there's no substitute for actual human testing, to find the edge cases, ensure that things are working correctly, and catch things for which there's no automated testing yet. And creating those tests are a great way to ensure that problems don't reappear in the future.

Promotion and outreach

We want the CentOS SIGs to represent the enormous diversity of the open source landscape itself. We want the Storage SIG to represent not only the hugely popular software defined storage solutions everyone has heard of, but also the smaller communities with more niche use cases. We want the PaaS SIG to represent all of the various PaaS projects.

This takes outreach to the projects themselves, and to the users of those projects, to persuade them of the value of being involved in the SIG process, and then to help onboard them into that process.

It also takes improvement of our documentation to make it more accessible to people who aren't already familiar with how this all works.

And it takes enthusiastic people to produce materials for use at events, and then staff those events to explain to beginners how to get involved.

We even have a separate SIG for this - the Promotion SIG - which focuses on getting the word out, and helping to onboard people when they arrive. And the Artwork SIG is responsible for creating artwork for use both in the distribution, and on our various websites, to make the entire experience more visually appealing.

Get involved!

If you want to get involved in a SIG, or to start a new one, come join us for the SIG meetings on the #centos-devel channel on Freenode IRC. Have a look at the list of active SIGs, and see if there's one that interests you. Or look at the proposed SIGs and see if there's something you can do to get them bootstrapped.

Events

Recent events

October was a very, very busy month for CentOS events all over the world.

CentOS was a sponsor of Ohio LinuxFest, in Columbus, Ohio. OLF is an annual event, drawing most of its attendees from Ohio, and surrounding states. The first day of the event has in-depth technical tutorials, while the second day draws more of a hobbyist audience, including a number of highschool students. As such, it’s a great opportunity to talk about CentOS and Fedora. Our friends from Fedora shared our space with us, and we had a number of great conversations with our fans, as well as talking with a number of local businesses who run their operations on CentOS, Fedora, and RHEL.

Later in the month, we held our second annual CentOS Dojo at CERN. There were around 100 people in attendance, and presentations ranged from science to technical to community. We started the day with a presentation from CERN about how they use CentOS, OpenStack, and Ceph in their investigation of the secrets of the universe. We then heard from a number of our SIGs (Special Interest Groups) about what they’re working on, and how people can get more involved. You can watch the video from each presentation by clicking on the paperclip icon next to the individual items in the event schedule listing.

On the day before the Dojo, we had a smaller gathering of our SIGs. There was discussion about the upcoming changes to the Git infrastructure - a conversation that was started at this event last year. Various SIGs reported on what they’ve been working on over the last few months. And there was discussion about how we can get more contributors involved in the SIG process. (See the SIG Updates section of this newsletter for more about this.) Watch the centos-devel list for more discussions around these topics.

During the week of October 22nd, a few of us were at Open Source Summit in Edinburgh (the event formerly known as LinuxCon. Here, too, we had great interactions with people from all levels of involvement, from people running massive server farms to kids running CentOS at home.

And finally, in the last week of the month, we had a sponsor booth at LISA in Nashville, once again shared with our friends from Fedora. LISA - Large Installation System Administration Conference - is one of the oldest software conferences in the world, going back to 1987.

If you are aware of any events in November where CentOS has (or should have!) a presence, please don’t hesitate to announce it on the centos-promo mailing list so that we can help you promote it. Or, you can add it directly to the upcoming events page.

Upcoming events

The next big event for the CentOS community is FOSDEM, and the CentOS Dojo immediately before FOSDEM. We will be announcing the schedule for this event today or tomorrow - as soon as the speakers respond with confirmation of their attendance. See you in Brussels!

Contributing to CentOS Pulse

We are always on the look-out for people who are interested in helping to:

report on CentOS community activity

provide a report from the SIG on which you participate

maintain a (sub-)section of the newsletter

write an article on an interesting person or topic

provide the hint, tip or trick of the month

Please see the page with further information about contributing. You can also contact the Promotion SIG, or just email Rich directly (rbowen@centosproject.org) with ideas or articles that you'd like to see in the next newsletter.