Ho Ho Ho!

Were you a very good Member this year? Only 49 days until Santa is coming to town.

You know whats better? 3 and a half days before that we will have the results of the openSUSE Board elections! But to actually get results all the cool, good looking and smart (pick any one) openSUSE Members have to vote for the candidates. If you already have applied as a Member in the past and got rejected we would like to strongly suggest to re-apply. Just because your contributions weren’t enough the last time it has to be true this time right? We have recently added the possibility to re-apply in users.opensuse.org, so just click on the “Reapply for membership” link.

If you did not apply for an openSUSE membership yet, simply head over to users.openSUSE.org, login, and then go to your profile page and select the “I want to Become a Member” link, and there mention your contributions.  Once you are accepted as a Member you will receive an @opensuse.org email address, can cloak your freenode.net IRC nick with the opensuse/membber cloak and Planet SUSE wil syndicate your blog which you can start directly at Lizards.openSUSE.org. But most importantly you can vote in the upcoming  ballot which will start December 8th, 2009. So…

Another nice shout-out for the openSUSE community here: The USENIX association magazine, ;login, has recognized openSUSE as having the same level of protection against some of the recently discovered package management vulnerabilities as enterprise-class distros. Says Federico Lucifredi:

What’s more, the openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise distros not only secure packages and package metadata with cryptographic signatures, but have addressed the more exotic attacks described by the paper as well, with the slow-data fix currently in Factory completing the picture. The upshot of this is that users can deploy updates safely whether they’re obtaining updates from a centralized network or through a decentralized system of community maintained mirrors.

The full article is available as a PDF. Definitely worth a read!

If you’re subscribed to opensuse-announce (and if not, why not? ) and/or read news.opensuse.org, you’ve no doubt seen the announcement of some downtime for download.opensuse.org.

We’ve done a lot to improve openSUSE infrastructure uptime in the last year, and we’re continuing to move forward there. On this particular issue, we’re adding the redundancy we need to ensure that we have a backup in place for download.opensuse.org in the event the primary machine is down for some reason.

In addition, we’ll also be looking for other areas where we have a single point of failure or weak spot in the infrastructure and addressing those as well.

We’ll probably never eliminate downtime 100% — Murphy’s Law being what it is — but the goal is to get as close to that as possible, and for any downtime to be very minimal. Thanks for the patience while we get this issue fixed, and a big thanks to everyone who was involved in getting this fixed — Peter Poeml, Christian Schneemann, Nat Friedman and his team, and everyone else.