Well deserved thanks.

Short and belated post: I wanted to give some sincere and heartfelt gratitude to the sysadmins for Fedora that keep our infrastructure in tip top condition daily. Sorry I missed saying this on SysAdmin day, but you guys just rock! Thanks for all you do for us, seen and unseen.

Most hearty congratulations.

Sandro Mathys reports on his blog that he was selected as the 2010 RHCE of the Year for Europe. I'm not surprised to see another active Fedora contributor selected for this honor, like John Rose in 2009 for North America and Jeroen van Meeuwen for Europe and Michael Yingbull for Canada in 2008.

RHCEs take a challenging, practical test to ensure they have a high degree of capability and performance. If you want to do well on that test (or any other for that matter), you practice. RHCEs know as they practice their skills on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, they can develop new skills in emerging technologies on Fedora for use now and in the future. I suspect a lot of RHCEs use RHEL at work and Fedora on their desktop or at home in part for that reason. But more than just developing skills, the Fedora community allows anyone — not just an RHCE — to work with some of the brightest people in free and open source software, and contribute to what they use.

Our community Infrastructure team, for example, has quite a number of RHCE-certified people involved as you might expect. This team that puts exceptional IT service management principles to work every day, providing services for the Fedora community. They also develop frameworks and applications we use, and moreover, they provide them as 100% free and open source software. Anyone can not only use that software, but modify it for their own use and redistribute it as well. There are may other areas in Fedora in which we have RHCEs scattered throughout teams as well.

In each case of the previous RHCE winners from Fedora, someone who's discovered the value of Fedora has also stepped up to bring some knowledge and skill back into the community. Sandro, for instance, a long-time Fedora Ambassador, is heading up the team that will bring the Fedora Users and Developers Conference to Zurich this fall. I'm proud to add Sandro to this growing list of honored community members. Congratulations, sir!

Elections are open.

During the next week, Fedora contributors will vote for open seats on both the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The polls are now open for both elections through the Fedora Election System. (Remember to login or you won't see the voting link for an election.) The elections will close on Wednesday, 2010-05-26 at UTC 23:59.

If you aren't familiar with how the system works, check out the Fedora Elections Guide. I also encourage Fedora community members to review the logs from our Town Hall meetings, where the candidates talked openly about their goals and viewpoints. Get informed, and then vote appropriately.

I thanked our election volunteers previously, but I also wanted to say a quick thanks to Mike McGrath and Mark Chappell on the Fedora Infrastructure team, who both ensured that the elections were set up properly and ready for business. Mark is actually working on application upgrades and better usability,which I hope we'll be able to use in the next regular election cycle. It's great to see a contributor jumping in to make a difference and improve the systems we use regularly.

Enough of my yakkin', whaddya say? Let's boogie. Go vote!

Quick links: (Board election)  (FESCo election)

Rocky road made smooth.

Thanks to hard work by people working on the Fedora Infrastructure team, we have a newer Transifex working on translate.fp.o. I wrote more about this in an earlier post, so I won’t endlessly repeat the whistles and cheers of a grateful (Fedora) nation here. But it’s now, while the Docs and L10n teams are hip-deep in translation of release notes and other written content, that we really appreciate having that new version online.

In Fedora 11 and 12 cycles, we had to do a very painstaking process involving manual runs of the gettext utilities to produce translation files that the old Transifex could understand and deal with. The newer Transifex 0.7.4, on the other hand, understands perfectly the way that our documentation tool Publican produces translation files. It’s a tremendous time saver.

Now for Fedora 13 we just merge some git branch content and update the translation (POT/PO) files, and Transifex handles everything else for us. It’s made the process so smooth this release that at the Docs meetings I keep scratching my head and thinking, “Where’s the danger? Where’s the fear and loathing? The sturm und drang?” No more rocky road!

Except for the ice cream of course. Mmm, ice cream.

M-stone.

According to the Statistics page on the wiki, last week we passed 1 million IP checkins for Fedora 12 systems!  This is roughly on par with where Fedora 11 was at the same time after its release, although it’s hard to discern the actual number of installations worldwide.

Although IP addresses are a convenient and anonymous way to gather these statistics, they’re not foolproof.  But given our past experience and analysis, which you can see in more detail in the section on yum check-ins, we are confident we’re significantly undercounting installations. There are millions of existing systems running Fedora 11 and other previous releases as well, although older systems are no longer receiving updates and we recommend that people try the latest and best free software available. And in a significant number of cases there are NATs and proxies that further impact this undercounting.

The above considerations influence me to be skeptical when I hear answers to the question “How many systems are running ‘Foo’?”. Is the claim supported with hard numbers? Are those numbers public and independently verifiable? As part of Fedora’s dedication to transparency, I definitely take those questions seriously.

We’re always trying to think of ways to improve our statistics gathering that continue that tradition of transparency, respect users’ privacy, and support the globally mirrored infrastructure that works so well (thanks Infrastructure team!). If you’ve got a suggestion that takes those factors into account, and you can help implement it, let me and other folks know through the advisory-board list.

Election extensions.

As seen here on the fedora-advisory-board list:

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and here’s the plan we arrived at:

• The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8. This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur, there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available to all community members. All townhalls will be finished by that point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.
• Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an additional day. For any additional day of outage, we’ll extend the end of voting by another additional day. Again, we aren’t expecting to have to do this, but it’s better for us to have a plan ahead of time. If there is no outage, voting will end on December 15 as originally planned.
• Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote. This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election system, even in the event of a brief outage. If any user detects a problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure list, or a Trac ticket.

We’ll be putting announcements out elsewhere as well — but as Darren noted, there’s nothing wrong with getting your vote in early!

Fedora Talk activity day.

For a while now, I’ve been working on plans for a FAD to work on our Fedora Talk VoIP system. There are a couple gaps I’d really like to fill, such as the ability to record, publish, and/or stream calls. These features would make the system much more capable of high transparency. They’d also contribute to an archival history that might help future contributors in the same way as other types of conference and meeting proceedings.

For example, it would be really cool if we could use the Talk server to record our sessions at FUDCon, which could be streamed and/or downloaded later by any community member. The only thing we’d need to do is to run a microphone into any laptop running a VoIP softphone on Fedora Talk, set the record level, and voila.

The raison d’être for any Fedora Activity Day is to gather a small number of interested contributors to a central location to work on short-term, focused goals that advance some part of the Fedora Project. (These are very different from the Fedora Users and Developers Conferences (FUDCons), which are much larger gatherings that serve many needs.) I’ve been to a couple of FADs this year already, including one for Documentation in Clemson, SC, and another for the development cycle in Raleigh, NC. So, in keeping with the slow sojourn up the East Coast, I am working on one that will be held in my hometown of Fredericksburg, VA.

It might be nice to add one more person with some Python and Infrastructure skills to our merry band, especially if they know something about streaming media. If you’re interested, drop me a line and put your name on the wiki page.

If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.

Some important statistics from the first week of Fedora 11 release:

• Over 140 Terabytes of Fedora 11 shipped via BitTorrent.
• Approximately 200,000 direct downloads from unique IP addresses. (Incidentally, there were over 600,000 requests but some IP addresses requested more than one download.)
• Over 1,000,000 1,200,000 visits to our web and wiki site in just seven days.

Note that our expert Fedora Infrastructure team made all this traffic almost unnoticeable to people, instead of crushing our servers to their knees. Hopefully Mike McGrath and some of the other team members will post a little bit about how they pull all this off. (Hint, hint!) I know that we use memcached, and that MirrorManager, maintained by Matt Domsch, figures heavily into our ability to get people to the closest Fedora bits when they request a download.

It never ceases to amaze me that our releases don’t seem to cause meltdowns like they used to. I think the Infrastructure team secretly yearns for release days to be more exciting, but it’s ironic that their own success makes that less likely.

We’ll change all that’s gone before.

Well, the accolades for our infrastructure team continue to pour in. On the heels of last month’s report of their superb uptime stats, I just found that November brought an all-time high for monthly visitors to fedoraproject.org. This is part of our general statistics page, where we openly and transparently show metrics that are of interest to our community. Great work, team!

_{I think that Ian should remember who holds the purse strings for his travel to FUDCon. It sure would be a shame to leave a man behind cleaning the kitchen slops at the hotel! Ha! Ha!}

_KIDDING!

Far too long for snakes.

It may have been a whole 26 minutes since I last sang the praises of the Fedora Infrastructure team, but lo and behold, what should end up in my inbox but an uptime measurement survey from the good people at Pingdom. And guess who’s at the top of the heap?

I’d applaud but my hands are sore!

And as a reminder, our Infrastructure team uses only the tastiest free and open source software to do it like they do. Being free software is in the blood for these guys, and we love them for it. And of course, we owe a grateful shout out to our sponsors as well, who have deeded over equipment on which to keep the freedom coming.