CentOS Pulse #1803 - 7 August 2018

Dear CentOS Enthusiast,

Thanks for coming back for another edition of the CentOS newsletter. We've got a lot for you this month.

For immediate notification of releases and updates, join the centos-announce mailing list by sending a blank message to centos-announce-subscribe@centos.org

Releases

On July 3rd, we announced the release of CentOS 6.10. As was noted in the Facebook thread on this topic, there are still many people that are running production services on CentOS 6. Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 doesn't EOL until 30 Nov, 2020, you can expect CentOS to continue doing releases in the 6.x branch until then, too.

You can read the full release announcement on the CentOS blog.

As is usual with a point release of this magnitude, it was quickly followed by a lengthy list of CentOS Errata and Bugfix Advisories (CEBA) and CentOS Errata and Security Advisories (CESA) notices. So we'll skip the usual enumeration of individual advisories that we usually include at this point, and direct you to the announce list archives instead for the full list.

Get Involved

There are many places where you can get involved in the CentOS project, depending on your interests. There's opportunities for everyone, and not just those who are coders.

Promotion

The CentOS Promotion SIG is responsible for any promotional activity around the CentOS Project, from this newsletter, to social media, to conferences and events. You can help by ...

Being a "reporter" for this newsletter, looking for press mentions, interviewing users, and reporting on events and conferences

Help us provide content to our various social media outlets

Write articles for the CentOS Blog

Attending, or helping produce, various CentOS events

Join us on the Promo mailing list to see how you can help.

Answer Questions

There are several places where people ask CentOS questions every day. These include the general CentOS mailing list, the CentOS Forums, IRC, Facebook, and Reddit. Often, these questions remain unanswered, or get answers that fall short of best practice.

Your expertise in answering these questions will help out many people, as well as raising your own profile within the CentOS world.

User Feedback

If you're an active user of CentOS, we want to hear from you. We want your stories for the blog. We want your feedback and questions about our software. These are ways that we can improve it for you, and, in turn, for everyone else that relies on CentOS.

SIGs - Special Interest Groups - do the daily work of packaging and testing on top of CentOS. You can read more about SIGs, and see which ones are active, in the SIG wiki.

Most of our active SIGs have regularly scheduled IRC meetings, where you can learn about what they're working on, and where you can get involved. You can also read full meeting transcripts.

The originating opstools architecture has seen some change over the time. In first shot, performance metrics collected by collectd were sent to graphite, and visualized in grafana. Then we added the possibility to use gnocchi instead of graphite.

This year saw a more significant change; metrics are now sent via AMQP 1.0 finally to prometheus, alerts can or should be handled by altermanager. This setup provides better scalability and robostness. This is tightly connected to the OPNFV Barometer project.

In other news, with centos-release-opstools-1.8, users get binaries for aarch64 and ppc64le.

The OpsTools SIG meets weekly on Wednesday at 1800 UTC in #centos-devel.

(proposed) CentOS Messaging SIG

The proposed SIG should handle messaging stacks in CentOS, mostly around the protocols AMQP 0.9 (rabbitmq), AMQP 1.0 (qpid). Another possible addition would be Kafka and supporting projects.

In the past, we have seen SIGs (Cloud and Opstools) consuming products from the Messaging SIG, but a more organized approach would provide benefit for a broader audience. The use cases are clearly not limited just to cloud and operational tools.

Virtualization SIG

Xen 4.8.4 has been released (blog post here) and is now built for CentOS 7.

[https://ovirt.org/release/4.2.5/ oVirt 4.2.5 has been released).

The SIG welcomes new community member Frantisek Kluknavsky (fkluknav on IRC).

The Virtualization SIG meets every two weeks (on even weeks) on Tuesday at 1500 UTC in #centos-devel.

Cloud SIG

The Cloud SIG wishes to encourage participation from other Cloud Infrastructure projects (it's currently mostly OpenStack, with occasional input from CloudStack).

The Cloud SIG meets weekly on Thursday at 1500 UTC in #centos-devel.

Storage SIG

Since the beginning of August, the Storage SIG provides easy installation of projects for additional alternative architectures (ppc64le and aarch64) on CentOS 7 in addition to x86_64. The projects that are made availble for these architectures are Ceph Limunous, Gluster 3.12 and Gluster 4.1.

Packages that enable the repositories are part of CentOS Extras and can be installed directly from the commandline:

centos-release-ceph-luminous

centos-release-gluster (provided by centos-release-gluster41)

centos-release-gluster312

Note to SIG participants

Notes for the newsletter come from your minutes. Putting informative statements in your minutes, using the #info tag during the meeting, will greatly enhance the quality of your updates in this newsletter. Thanks.

Events

CentOS participates in numerous events around the world. If you're running, or participating in, an event where you'd like to have some kind of a CentOS presence, please get in touch with the Promotion SIG to explore options.

Recent Events

Since the last edition of the newsletter, we've participated in the following events.

DevConf.IN

Last weekend, DevConf.IN was held in Bengaluru, India. It's the second year for this event, which focuses on tools and techniques for developers.

There were about 1400 people in attendance, and CentOS had a presence there, which you can see in this tweet.

You can expect to see reports from that event on the CentOS blog in the coming days.

Upcoming Events

We have a number of events planned for the rest of this year, and we'd love to see you at an event near you.

Conferences and Conventions

CentOS expects to have a presence at the following events in 2018:

August 16-19th, Boston, USA: Devconf.us and Dojo

Devconf.us is a new event, modeled after Devconf.cz. CentOS will be participating in two capacities.

On the 16th, we will be hosting a CentOS Dojo at Boston University. The schedule has now been published, and registration is open. The event is free, but as we have limited space, we need you to register, for planning purposes.

On the 17th through the 19th, the main Devconf.us event will also be at Boston University. The schedule is expected to be posted today - July 2nd. CentOS will have a table in the community expo hall, and we're looking for volunteers to staff that table.

Hope to see you next week in Boston!

October 12-13, Columbus, USA: Ohio Linuxfest

CentOS will be sponsoring Ohio Linuxfest this year, and we're looking for volunteers to help staff the booth. More details are available in the CentOS wiki, and more detail will be provided as we get closer to the event.

October 18th, 19th, Meyrin Switzerland: Dojo at CERN

On October 18th, we will be hosting a Dojo at CERN. The call for papers is open, and we'll be publishing a schedule in August.

February 1, 2019, Brussels, Belgium: FOSDEM

It seems like a long way off, but it will be here before you know it. As usual, we'll be hosting a CentOS Dojo on the day before FOSDEM at the Marriott Grand Place, in Brussels. We've already opened the call for presentations, and plan to announce a schedule in late October.

April 2019, Oak Ridge, Tennesee, USA

We're just beginning to plan a Dojo in April of 2019 at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Labs. We're tentatively planning a two day event: Day one will be run at UT, and will be end-user focused. Day two will be at ORNL, and be sysadmin focused, deep technical content. Stay tuned for details as soon as we have them.

Recommending Events

If you know of events where CentOS should have a presence, and currently doesn't, please get in touch with the Promotion SIG to let us know about the event, and what kind of participation we should have. Thanks!

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.