FWN/Issue260

= Fedora Weekly News Issue 260 =

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 260 for the week ending January 26, 2011. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

In announcements, details on the official release of Fedora 14 64-bit for IBM System z, and upcoming details on gtk2 support ending for Evolution related packages in Rawhide, the development version of Fedora. We have three articles in Fedora In the News, and Quality Assurance previews the first Fedora 15 upcoming Test Day, updates on the AutoQA process, and more. Our issue this week wraps up with security-related packages released this past week for Fedora 13 and 14. Enjoy!

An audio version of some issues of FWN - FAWN - are available! You can listen to existing issues on the Internet Archive. If anyone is interested in helping spread the load of FAWN production, please contact us!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

FWN Editorial Team: Pascal Calarco, Adam Williamson

Announcements
In this section, we cover announcements from the Fedora Project, including general announcements, development announcements and Events.

Contributing Writer: Rashadul Islam

Fedora Announcement News
The announcement list is always exclusive for the Fedora Community. Please, visit the past announcements at

OUTAGE: PHX2 Network outage - 2011-01-25 02:00 UTC
Stephen John Smoogen on Thu Jan 20 21:36:58 UTC 2011 announced ,

"There will be an outage starting at 2011-01-25 02:00 UTC, which will last approximately 3 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at

Howto or run:
date -d '2011-01-25 02:00 UTC'

Reason for outage:
We are moving from older netapp to newer one due to hardware limitations and aging hardware. Due to change in disk architectures and such, we will be having a total outage of Fedora services.

Affected Services:

 * BFO -
 * Bodhi -
 * Buildsystem -
 * CVS / Source Control
 * Docs -
 * Email system
 * Fedora Account System -
 * Fedora Community -
 * Fedora Hosted -
 * Fedora People -
 * Fedora Talk -
 * Main Website -
 * Mirror List -
 * Mirror Manager -
 * Package Database -
 * Smolt -
 * Spins -
 * Start -
 * Torrent -
 * Translation Services -
 * Wiki -

Unaffected Services:
DNS - ns1.fedoraproject.org, ns2.fedoraproject.org

Contact Information:
Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track the status of this outage.

Ticket:
"

Security incident on Fedora infrastructure on 23 Jan 2011
Fedora Project Leader, Jared K. Smith on Tue Jan 25 00:14:23 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Summary: Fedora infrastructure intrusion but no impact on product integrity

On January 22, 2011 a Fedora contributor received an email from the Fedora Accounts System indicating that his account details had been changed. He contacted the Fedora Infrastructure Team indicating that he had received the email, but had not made changes to his FAS account. The Infrastructure Team immediately began investigating, and confirmed that the account had indeed been compromised.

At this time, the Infrastructure Team has evidence that indicates the account credentials were compromised externally, and that the Fedora Infrastructure was not subject to any code vulnerability or exploit.

The account in question was not a member of any sysadmin or Release Engineering groups. The following is a complete list of privileges on the account:
 * SSH to fedorapeople.org (user permissions are very limited on this machine).
 * Push access to packages in the Fedora SCM.
 * Ability to perform builds and make updates to Fedora packages.

The Infrastructure Team took the following actions after being notified of the issue: 1. Lock down access to the compromised account 2. Take filesystem snapshots of all systems the account had access to (pkgs.fedoraproject.org, fedorapeople.org) 3. Audit SSH, FAS, Git, and Koji logs from the time of compromise to the present Here, we found that the attacker did:
 * Change the account's SSH key in FAS
 * Login to fedorapeople.org

The attacker did not:
 * Push any changes to the Fedora SCM or access pkgs.fedoraproject.org in any way
 * Generate a koji cert or perform any builds
 * Push any package updates

Based on the results of our investigation so far, we do not believe that any Fedora packages or other Fedora contributor accounts were affected by this compromise.

While the user in question had the ability to commit to Fedora SCM, the Infrastructure Team does not believe that the compromised account was used to do this, or cause any builds or updates in the Fedora build system. The Infrastructure Team believes that Fedora users are in no way threatened by this security breach and we have found no evidence that the compromise extended beyond this single account.

As always, Fedora packagers are recommended to regularly review commits to their packages and report any suspicious activity that they notice.

Fedora contributors are strongly encouraged to choose a strong FAS password. Contributors should *NOT* use their FAS password on any other websites or user accounts. If you receive an email from FAS notifying you of changes to your account that you did not make, please contact the Fedora Infrastructure team immediately via admin at fedoraproject.org.

We are still performing a more in-depth investigation and security audit and we will post again if there are any material changes to our understanding"

Fedora 14 for IBM System z 64bit official release
Phil Knirsch on Tue Jan 25 17:59:31 UTC 2011 announced ,

"It's been a long time since we last had an official release of IBM System z on Fedora...

A really long time...

A really, really long time...

In fact and to be precise, it's been 134,265,600 seconds or 2,237,760 minutes or 37,296 hours or 1554 days since Fedora 6 was released on October 24th 2006 which was the last release where IBM System z was included.

But today, today changes all this.

As today, the Fedora IBM System z (s390x) Secondary Arch team proudly presents the Fedora 14 for IBM System z 64bit official release!

And without further ado, here the links to the actual release:

and obviously on all mirrors that mirror the secondary arch content.

The first directory contains the normal installation trees as well as 1 DVD ISO and 5 CD ISOs with the complete release.

Everything as usual contains, well, everything. :)

We have collected a couple of example config files, kickstart examples and a nice README here:

but beware that currently the images found there are still outdated, we're working on fixing that over the next weeks.

Additional information about know issues, the current progress and state for future release, where and how the team can be reached and just anything else IBM System z on Fedora related can be found here:

Thanks go out to everyone involved in making this happen!"

Fedora Development News
The development list is intended to be a LOW TRAFFIC announce-only list for Fedora development.

Acceptable Types of Announcements
 * Policy or process changes that affect developers.
 * Infrastructure changes that affect developers.
 * Tools changes that affect developers.
 * Schedule changes
 * Freeze reminders

Unacceptable Types of Announcements
 * Periodic automated reports (violates the INFREQUENT rule)
 * Discussion
 * Anything else not mentioned above

rawhide update (2.91.6) of evolution-related packages is gtk3 only
Milan Crha on Wed Jan 26 16:16:26 UTC 2011 announced ,

"Evolution team drops support for gtk2 in 2.91.6 release of evolution-related packages (gtkhtml3, evolution-data-server and evolution) which might make trouble for dependent packages which are still gtk2. I expect there will follow gtk3 updates for them in the near future too, if not done already (this is mainly for packages using libedataserverui and gtkhtml3, the rest should be fine).

There are done soname bumps and api version bumps in above mentioned packages as well. The release will be done on Monday, when I plan to update rawhide too (+/- few days, if something will go wrong)."

Later Peter Robinson on Wed Jan 26 18:15:33 UTC 2011 reply over the thread.

Fedora Events
Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Upcoming Events (Dec 2010 - Feb 2011)

 * North America (NA)
 * Central & South America (LATAM):
 * Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)
 * India, Asia, Australia (India/APJ)

Past Events
Archive of Past Fedora Events

Additional information

 * Reimbursements -- reimbursement guidelines.
 * Budget -- budget for the current quarter (as distributed by FAMSCo).
 * Sponsorship -- how decisions are made to subsidize travel by community members.
 * Organization -- event organization, budget information, and regional responsibility.
 * Event reports -- guidelines and suggestions.
 * LinuxEvents -- a collection of calendars of Linux events.

Fedora In the News
In this section, we cover news from the trade press and elsewhere that is re-posted to the Fedora Marketing list.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Open source status report reveals good health and profits (NetworkWorld)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded a posting reporting on some statistics on the vitality of the Fedora Project:

"The Fedora Linux project sees over 2 million unique visitors to its site in a given month; over 150,000 downloads; and over 25,000 active contributors of code, documentation, translations and bug submissions per month."

The full article is available

Fedora Linux suffers a security incident - compromise risk is minimal (InternetNews.com)
Rahul Sundaram forwarded news on a recent Fedoraproject.org credential compromise:

"Long story short is that a Fedora contributor had his/her credentials stolen and then an attacker began to use those credentials to attempt to tamper with the Fedora infrastructure. Due to the limited privileges of the exploited account (and some good luck) it appears as though there has been no risk to Fedora's build or infrastructure."

The full article is available.

Einbruch in Fedoras Infrastruktur
Henrik Heigl forwarded a press release in German about the security breach:

"Das Linux-Projekt Fedora hat einen Einbruch in seine Infrastruktur bestätigt, es habe jedoch keine Manipulationen an Software-Projekten gegeben. Der oder die unbekannten Täter haben laut einer Stellungnahme von Jared K. Smith offenbar über gestohlene Zugangsdaten den Weg in das Fedora-Projekt gefunden. Auf den Einbruch sei man aufmerksam geworden, weil ein Mitarbeiter vom Fedora-Accounts-System eine Nachricht bekam, es seien Kontodaten geändert worden."

The full article is available.

QualityAssurance
In this section, we cover the activities of the QA team. For more information on the work of the QA team and how you can get involved, see the Joining page.

Contributing Writer: Adam Williamson

Test Days
This week sees the first Fedora 15 Test Day on 2011-01-27, on network device naming changes upcoming in Fedora 15. On compatible systems, Fedora 15 will use biosdevname to name the network interfaces; this provides a fully deterministic naming scheme on such systems, as opposed to the current system, where you cannot be sure that a given interface's name in Fedora will reflect its physical location or label. The Test Day will ensure this system is working correctly and also that it does not override existing preferred names on upgrades, so if you want to make sure this change has no unexpected consequences for you, make sure to come along to the Test Day! The testing involved will be easy and possible from a live image, and the Test Day page has instructions to find out if your hardware is involved in this change.

Next Thursday, 2011-02-03, will see the first of three planned Test Days on the GNOME 3 desktop, which is landing in Fedora 15. Mark it on your calendar!

Refining Bugzilla messages on updated packages
Luke Macken applied the patch from François Cami to improve the comments Bodhi leaves on bugs when the status of an update changes.

Test case management system proposal and requirements
During the QA weekly meeting of 2011-01-24, Rui He reported that she had completed the review of use cases and features in comparing the current Wiki-based system for managing test cases and the potential replacement, Nitrate. The next step is to identify must-have and nice-to-have features to see if any are missing from Nitrate, and write scripts to convert Wiki test cases into Nitrate test cases.

Multi-spin DVD review
On a request from David Nalley, some group members reviewed the proposed multi-spin DVD. Jóhann Guðmundsson suggested testing boot and installation of each live environment on the DVD. Christoph Wickert, the main proposer of the spin, agreed that this would be a good idea, but did not expect to hit any problems.

Smolt graphics card generation extraction
Adam Williamson suggested a project for anyone looking for one - extracting information on graphics card generations from Smolt. He explained that this would be useful for assessing the overall level of support for GNOME Shell in Fedora 15.

Package-specific and critical path test case process
James Laska provided a script implementing searching for package-specific test cases meeting the categorization guidelines recently put into practice.

AutoQA
The new koji watcher implementation submitted for review last week by Josef Skladanka, and the dependency checking test submitted by Will Woods, were both reviewed this week. The AutoQA team also identified an issue in Bodhi's use of -pending tags, which Luke Macken rapidly fixed.

Security Advisories
In this section, we cover Security Advisories from fedora-package-announce from the past week.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce

Contributing Writer: Pascal Calarco

Fedora 14 Security Advisories

 * hplip-3.10.9-14.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053474.html
 * myproxy-5.3-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053461.html
 * wordpress-mu-2.9.2-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053367.html
 * libuser-0.56.18-3.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053365.html
 * sssd-1.5.0-2.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053337.html
 * maniadrive-data-1.2-5.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053333.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-26.fc14.1 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053331.html
 * php-eaccelerator-0.9.6.1-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053332.html
 * php-5.3.5-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053330.html
 * dpkg-1.15.5.6-6.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053306.html
 * wordpress-2.8.6-4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053289.html
 * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-50.1.9.4.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053276.html
 * perl-Convert-UUlib-1.34-1.fc14 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053269.html

Fedora 13 Security Advisories

 * myproxy-5.3-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053473.html
 * hplip-3.10.9-14.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053472.html
 * libuser-0.56.16-1.fc13.2 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053378.html
 * maniadrive-data-1.2-5.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053355.html
 * maniadrive-1.2-26.fc13.1 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053357.html
 * php-eaccelerator-0.9.6.1-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053358.html
 * php-5.3.5-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053356.html
 * wordpress-mu-2.9.2-3.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053349.html
 * sudo-1.7.4p5-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053341.html
 * sssd-1.3.0-40.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053319.html
 * dpkg-1.15.5.6-6.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053311.html
 * wordpress-2.8.6-4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053293.html
 * perl-Convert-UUlib-1.34-1.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053290.html
 * java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-48.1.8.4.fc13 - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2011-January/053288.html